


then finally i save you

by andnowforyaya



Category: B.A.P, K-pop
Genre: Angst, Character Death, Emotional Manipulation, Gangs, M/M, Reincarnation, Soulmates, Violence, one shot au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-30
Updated: 2015-10-25
Packaged: 2018-04-02 00:02:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 22,685
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4039747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andnowforyaya/pseuds/andnowforyaya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Did you love me very much?” the boy in his dreams asks, his eyes glowing in the dark. His face is streaked with dirt and blood. They hold each other as the night grows cold. The sky explodes above them, brilliant white, raining fire.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

For now, they have this: a long stretch of road and a duffel with a couple changes of clothes each in the back of the car, a full tank and no destination, Yongguk’s handgun in the glove compartment. It was Yongguk’s idea, to get away from what they knew, for a chance, however slim, to eek out a couple of more months. Daehyun hadn’t fully understood, but he’d agreed anyway. The sun beams into the car from its perch on the horizon, throwing the road signs into shadow and making the air hot and stale inside. They’ve turned off the music on the radio. All the songs were about them.

The cracked windows let in warm, humid air, and Daehyun’s tank top sticks to his skin.

“Did you love me very much?” Daehyun asks Yongguk out of the corner of his mouth, too heavy to turn and face him. His chest rises and falls with slow breaths, half-lidded eyes unfocused and dark. His skin is a golden, nutty brown, smooth and unblemished and perfect.

“Every time,” Yongguk replies steadily. He watches the road.

.

Yongguk is ten years old and he dreams of war. The rapid staccato of gunfire, warm blood on the ground, uniforms stiff with mud. Hunger and fear and smoking cigarettes low in the trenches to escape sniper fire. Commands are given before dawn. This war used to be about liberation, freedom for our brothers and sisters in the North, but now it is about survival, and grit, and worst of all pride.

His teachers say he has an overactive imagination, that he is disruptive in class. He speaks of the War like he was in it! Why can’t he be like his twin brother Yongnam? Calm, attentive, smart. His parents are disappointed. They bring him to doctors, but there is no prescription that will diminish the power of the vivid images, the way his body won’t sit still, the way his heart beats like it is chasing a shadow.

There is a yearning there, in his heart. A face in his dreams. The salt scent of the ocean. Yongguk knows him, knows this yearning. In his dreams, they are foot soldiers in the war, and they share everything -- canteens and bullets and the warmth of each other’s skin.

Yongguk is ten years old but he feels twenty five. There is a space in his chest he is waiting to fill. The other half of his heart.

“Did you love me very much?” the boy in his dreams asks, his eyes glowing in the dark. His face is streaked with dirt and blood. They hold each other as the night grows cold. The sky explodes above them, brilliant white, raining fire.

.

They find a motel about a half-mile away from the beach. It’s a bare, flat little building with a small sign and few tourists, a sad empty pool overrun with vegetation in the lot behind it.

“It’s 30,000 _won_ a night,” the lady at the front tells them. She crushes a cigarette in the dish at her elbow. Daehyun lingers by the door, his shadow long on the floor.

“We’ll take a room for a month,” Yongguk says. He digs into his duffel, shoving aside their clothes and pulling out a wad of cash to place onto the counter. “Half now, half at the end.”

The lady raises her eyebrow, but her fingers still creep toward the money, pulling the stack close to her. “You kids in trouble?”

“No,” Yongguk says, knowing she won’t care either way.

She exchanges the money for a set of keys. “There’s no air conditioning in this one, but you won’t have to change rooms for the month.”

They go to the room. The key sticks in the lock as Daehyun taps his feet impatiently behind Yongguk. It is dark inside with the shades drawn. Yongguk flicks on the light, and the ceiling fan attached to it begins to creak in slow, lazy circles. There is a single queen-sized bed adorned with cream-colored sheets. Daehyun goes to check out the bathroom, and re-emerges with a shrug. “It’s not horrible,” he says.

The corners of Yongguk’s lips begin to lift. He throws the duffel into one of the armchairs by the window. They have a working bathroom, and a nightstand, and a small table, and a bed, and this room. They have Yongguk’s car. They have each other. They have everything they need.

He closes the door behind him and it locks automatically.

Daehyun throws himself onto the bed, arms above his head, his tank lifting to show a tanned strip of skin. The drive had been long, and he is tired. The ceiling fan creaks above him, spinning dust motes in the air. Outside, the sun sinks below the horizon. “Now what?” he asks Yongguk.

Yongguk places a knee on the bed, then his other knee, then his elbows, his body bracketing Daehyun’s, the younger boy’s dark hair wild around him like a thorny halo. His eyebrows knit together, but then there is a grin on his face, pleased and eager. “Oh,” Daehyun breathes.

“Now, this,” Yongguk says. Their lips touch. Yongguk’s hand traces the hot smooth line of Daehyun’s skin and comes to rest over his belly, where he runs his thumb over the gentle slopes of muscle there.

.

Yongguk is fifteen and it seems all he knows is war. When Yongnam dies from a car accident, his life snuffed like a flame on the way to a cold and impersonal hospital, Yongguk fractures, can’t hold himself together, and his family falls apart. His sister Natasha is of-age and leaves them, and Yongguk is shuttled between his parents, neither of them willing to claim him fully, this ghost of his brother. Same face but a different mind completely. Strange.

“I don’t know what’s going on in that head of yours,” his mother tells him.

There is distance. Yongguk is fifteen and his family has abandoned him, so when another family seeks him out, one whose bonds are cemented in favors and blood, it is easy to drift into their fold. He comes home with bruises over his face and something thrumming in his blood and his mother doesn’t know what to do with him, so she sends him off with a telling and some ice.

Yongguk shuffles, rolling his shoulders, cracking his joints. He is fifteen but he has lived five lifetimes. He goes into his room and lays back on the bed and presses ice against his skin and his mind drifts--

\--a long, narrow hallway and papered sliding doors, the air thick with incense. He has returned, but the young scholars could still be in their lessons. Affairs within the palace have not been disturbed despite the turmoil outside of its walls. His heart pounds against his chest. He’d thought of nothing but the other’s face while he was out there in the heat of battle, desperate to keep his promise, to make it home.

His footsteps echo, and the papered door slides open just as he reaches it, like the man on the other side had been waiting for him.

“General,” the other says, slightly short on breath, his shoulders narrow under the silk of his _hanbok_ , shadows under his eyes.

Yongguk’s breath stills, catching on the image of this face he has missed so dearly, from his large dark eyes to the high bridge of his nose and the full set of his lips. “I’ve returned,” Yongguk murmurs.

“Unharmed?” His voice shivers over Yongguk’s skin.

“You may see for yourself.”

The young scholar grins, but it is a slip of thing, not fully formed, his throat bobbing when he swallows. Yongguk ushers them both into the confines of the room, sliding the door shut behind him. He holds him, feeling him shudder there against his chest.

“You were gone for so long, I--”

Yongguk steps between his thighs, his hands circling his narrow waist, and touches his lips to the other’s forehead. “I know, and I am sorry,” he soothes. “For now, let us have this moment.”

They hold each other. There is little time before the first arrow breaches the outer walls of the palace--

\--Yongguk comes to when his phone beeps in his other hand, a message from his friend Himchan. The apartment creaks over him. He sees constellations in the dust floating lazily in the air, can feel the phantom touch of warm skin against his lips.

 _conveni on lot 57_ , Himchan sent him. _wear a mask_

.

At this time of night, the beach is empty of tourists, though they do come across a few locals who are on their evening stroll or walking their dogs. Daehyun wears one of Yongguk’s old black hoodies because he didn’t bring his own, the sleeves dripping past his longest fingers, the breeze ruffling his dark hair. Earlier, they ate dinner outside of a harshly-lit 7-11, filling their stomachs with meat buns from the hot food section.

Their elbows brush and Yongguk’s skin tingles at the contact. Daehyun’s touch has always had this effect on him. Yongguk wants to pull the hood over Daehyun’s head, to cover him with his possessions, to hide him away.

But Daehyun and people like Daehyun have always attracted attention, their presence like a second sun, bright and burning. He hadn’t thought he’d find him in this lifetime. He was sure of it. Even now, he has trouble picturing Daehyun’s beautiful skilled hands around the grip of a gun.

“Here’s good,” Daehyun says, skipping ahead a few steps and clearing a little space in the sand. The tide has risen, and if they stay here they will be underwater in an hour or so. But now, they are safe. He digs his heels into the sand and sits, placing the black bag they brought with them from the 7-11 next to his feet. From it, he tosses Yongguk a can of beer and takes one for himself.

A tap and a hiss. The beer is cold and prickles Yongguk’s throat as it slides past his tongue. He sits, drawing his knees up to drape his arms over them loosely, and he sighs into his can when Daehyun leans into him ever so slightly like they are magnetized toward each other.

“You really want to stay here for a month?” Daehyun asks, sipping from his can.

“Two months,” Yongguk answers. “Three. A year or more. Forever.”

Daehyun laughs, a sound that seems to rebound back from the surface of the ocean. “We don’t have the money,” he says. “And it’ll be winter eventually. Who wants to stay at the beach in the winter?”

“We’ll rent a place in the mountains. We can burn a fire in a real fireplace. Toast marshmallows. All that kid stuff.”

Daehyun knocks his shoulder into Yongguk’s, and then he does it again when he receives no answering shove. “A cabin for the winter and this motel for the summer. The city in between. That sounds nice.”

Yongguk tips his head back, gulps down bitter beer until his can is light with air. Above them all, the stars are out. Here by the ocean they are bright and glittering, mirrored in the sea’s depths. He wonders how many have already died, burnt out, their after-images all that is left of them. His throat burns, but he reaches into the plastic bag for another can. “No, not the city.”

Daehyun sags into the sand. His head finds Yongguk’s shoulder and stays there, and water laps at their ankles. They finish their beers. His hands take one of Yongguk’s from his knee to drag into his lap. Daehyun’s fingers are wet from condensation around the drink and grainy with sand, his skin smooth underneath that. He slots their fingers together, edge to edge, then closes his fist, warmth growing in the center of their palms.

He asks, “What are we running from?”

Yongguk tilts his head back and closes his eyes. This is what the sky looks like in the city. Black, no stars, not even their after-images. He wants a couple more months, hopes for a year, prays for eternity. Maybe this time it will be different.

He knows from experience that if he leaves a question unanswered for long enough, Daehyun will not pose it again, embarrassed and stung. There’s nothing around them now but the crush and fall of the waves, the pull of the sea. Yongguk brings their joined hands up to brush his lips over their knuckles.

“Let’s go back in,” he mumbles over them. “The tide’s rising.”

.

Yongguk is seventeen and he lives with his friend Himchan in a shabby, cramped apartment that belongs to their boss. Things are okay. He has the gang, and a roof over his head, and true friends, and enough money to last the week. Still, at night he dreams, sometimes of the boy, sometimes of Yongnam, and in the weak pale light of the morning, he wakes with an aching chest, a loneliness so profound he loses himself. Himchan usually finds him days later wandering some park or haunting some bus shelter, panic clear across his features at Yongguk’s disappearance.

“What if one day,” Himchan scolds him, “I can’t find you? At least turn your phone on when you wander like that. You know Boss doesn’t like it; you’re easy pickings for some other gang.”

Yongguk shrugs, and eats the food Himchan has cooked for him because if he doesn’t, Himchan will sulk; and besides, that is the only way he knows how to thank him. Yongguk has little to offer. He is loyal and steady but incomplete, and he thinks others can see this in him, in his eyes, in his apathy towards the world. If some other gang finds him, he thinks he would not put up much of a fight.

But Himchan always finds him, and Yongguk begins to write down his dreams.

.

The first week passes on the beach. They alternate their time between toasting on the hot sand and cooling down in the blue waters, sometimes falling asleep under the giant umbrella Yongguk rented out for them until the sun is almost set. They ruin their sleep cycles, eat barbecue from a place on the boardwalk at three in the morning, and sleep in the next day until noon. Time means nothing.

They kiss for hours. Here, Yongguk doesn’t have to worry about Himchan barging into his room to interrupt them, or Daehyun being called away by Youngjae. Here, Yongguk relearns the body he could draw in his sleep, the body he has inked into his journals.

_(first, you are small; not smaller than most, but smaller than i am. my handspan begins to fit around your narrow, tapered waist. you have features that will always define you, and they all have to do with your eyes -- dark and expressive and carrying some mysterious light, the beauty mark under your left, the way they form half-moons when you smile. i could recognize you by the curved bone of your wrist, but it was your eyes i learned first and that are my favorite.)_

Each vertebrae plays a new note falling from Daehyun’s lips, and Yongguk touches him so that he can hear them all.

The second week stalls. That is to be expected. Daehyun is not accustomed to a slow, tranquil life, and truthfully stability is not something that Yongguk has ever learned. They go to the beach, they swim, they eat, they sleep. Daehyun collects shells he finds in the sand or in the shallows, and brings them back to their motel room to dry out on the windowsill, turning them this way and that to see how they look in different lights. Yongguk will always remember the way the sun lances off Daehyun’s lashes, the way his face is thrown into shadow but he can still see his lovely eyes, the way he smiles when he sees Yongguk is staring. “Is there something on my face?”

“No,” Yongguk says, and kisses him.

The third week feels like they are nearing the peak of a mountain. Will they push on and pass it, or be forced back like Sisyphus and his boulder? They are hot, and the beach is too small. Daehyun has emptied the ocean of shells. Their motel room has become their own little universe, and it is imploding.

The ceiling fan clicks on every other revolution, and Daehyun’s eyes follow the blades lazily from his position on his back, lips parted. The sheets have just been cleaned. They feel luxurious on his skin, unbelievably soft for the cheap materials they are made of. Yongguk turns onto his side and cups Daehyun’s cheek in the palm of his hand to turn his face to meet his gaze.

Yongguk grins, but Daehyun is slow to follow. _Click, click, click,_ goes the fan, a clock dragging seconds. The air moves as slow as molasses.

“I like being on this trip with you,” Daehyun says in a feathery voice. It could be a whisper, but they are too close, and Daehyun’s voice has always seemed amplified to Yongguk besides. “But I don’t like you hiding things from me.”

“I know,” Yongguk says, rubbing his thumb over Daehyun’s beauty mark. His heart beats slow and sluggish in his chest, half a beat behind the other’s.

Daehyun sighs and rolls onto his side to face him fully. His fingers dance along Yongguk’s waist, skitter over his ribs. “At least you’re not outright lying to me,” he admits, though it ends with a petulant pout. “It can’t be much bigger than me finding out about the whole ‘reincarnated lovers’ though, right? Will you tell me eventually?”

Shifting closer, feeling their body heat mingling, Yongguk agrees. “Eventually.”

.

Yongguk is nineteen and stagnant. He works at a restaurant specializing in _dakgalbi_ and goes home smelling like pungent chilis. His days are a blur of smoke and orders, perforated by instances of urgency and action when their boss needs them to hit up a bank, or to find one of his loan sharks, or to deliver a message, but it is good to keep busy. Good to return to his humble shared apartment with Himchan, tired with sore ankles and a click in his wrist from rapidly writing down customer orders, because the alternative is to suffocate slowly with the weight of his dreams and memories.

Yongnam no longer haunts his dreams, though he thinks he will never truly be without him. They were twins after all, and Yongguk carries a part of him in his skin, in the way his body was put together. Maybe Yongnam makes up all the good left in him.

These other visions of the boy that crowd him like a sheet over his eyes are not dreams at all, Yongguk has determined, but memories. They must be. They are too real, so vivid that there are times Yongguk questions the reality around him now. Waking, he spends a moment acclimating to the world as he lays in bed, wondering: is he the general today? or the foot soldier? the farmer’s son or the noble? Or is he simply Yongguk, who works at the _dakgalbi_ restaurant?

Himchan calls him a day-dreamer. “You’re so introverted it hurts,” he teases, but he can’t understand the effect of Yongguk’s memories, the weight of them adding gravity to his movements. Youngjae, a nimble-fingered and quick-witted new recruit into their family, teases Himchan that Yongguk must be in love, waggling his eyebrows. Himchan leaves with fire in his cheeks, and Yongguk admonishes Youngjae for embarrassing someone older than he is, not telling anyone that Youngjae is closer to the mark than any of them realize.

His heart beats without its partner; he feels half a person, knowing something vital is missing from his life. In the mornings Yongguk writes what he remembers of his visions from the night before, hoping to capture the thing he is chasing, but he knows his words can’t compare to the subject itself.

_(there is the one where we are both soldiers -- my first memories to resurface, perhaps because they are the nearest. we were assigned the same group and met that first day. you stuck to me like a flea, and at first the other men teased you for it, but i didn’t mind it, and you pretended not to notice. i didn’t mind it at all. you were an early riser, but i slept like the dead. if not for you, our captain would have driven me into an early grave punishing me for oversleeping the morning drills.)_

_(there is the one where you are a scholar and i am a general. there is not much about this life i remember, except that there is a war going on. there is always a war going on. you smiled at me and called me a philosopher. i called you a brat. you were the reason i kept coming home.)_

_(there is the one where you are an orphan sent to work in the villages surrounding the capital, and it is my family who receives you. you are diligent and careful. i fall in love with the way you sift your hands through the rice as you wash the grains. we work together in the mornings and take our meals in the fields, and we steal away when we think no one is looking.)_

_(there is the one where you are a woman, your body soft and sweet. when i reached between your legs i found delicate, wet folds, but they did not seem strange on you, though i remembered how you were, how you have been, maybe even how you would be. such is our existence. you could take any form, and i would find them all beautiful.)_

_(here is what is the same: the way your mouth forms around my name, your eyes, your smile. you tilt your head when you are amused, and you can’t hold back tears when you are very happy or when you are very sad. your fingers fit in mine. together, we are complete. somehow, you carry the ocean with you, its scent and weight and depths.)_

_(here is what is the same: your death, sudden and violent.)_

.


	2. Chapter 2

Yongguk startles awake with Daehyun’s hair in his mouth, their bodies twisted into the sheets, the fan creaking above them. He’d dreamed of Daehyun’s body in the ocean, the currents pulling at his soft skin, the tide sweeping him under. He’d swam for him as a storm raged above, fighting against the waves, and his heart still flutters with the adrenaline rushing through his system. This had not been a memory, he assures himself, gulping air, choking on the imagined water in his lungs. This is not the way Daehyun dies.

The other boy is a light sleeper, and he shifts in his arms. Yongguk feels the moment Daehyun’s palm connects with his chest, absorbing the rapid pulse there. “What’s wrong?” Daehyun murmurs the words into his skin.

“Dream,” Yongguk says simply, belying the way the images have sparked his anxiety. He pulls Daehyun close until their bodies are lined up, feeling him breathe and matching his rhythm, slow and even, bellies pressed against each other. The air is dry but hot and makes Daehyun’s skin feel like a fever over his. He feels Daehyun squirm so that he may look at him, eyes level with Yongguk’s chin.

“Do you want to tell me about it?”

“Not this one,” Yongguk says. He rests his chin over Daehyun’s head, and he presses the other boy’s face into his neck. If Daehyun is uncomfortable, he doesn’t voice it. His breath warms Yongguk’s throat. He is real and solid and Yongguk will keep him safe. If there is anything he must do in this life, it is that.

Light begins to fill their room as morning stretches its bright fingers across the beach and into dark corners. Yongguk allows his mind to wander a restricted path, with only thoughts about their present allowed. Daehyun’s body molds against his until he can’t tell where he ends and Daehyun begins, and only then does he calm. Together, they are complete.

“I wish I had your memories,” Daehyun whispers like confessing a secret to a cave full of echoes. “I wish I knew us the way you know us.”

Yongguk feels his heart skip a beat and hopes Daehyun did not feel it as well, pressed as close as they are. He lets his hands wander down Daehyun’s back, over his ribs, down the slope of his waist, bringing them finally to rest on the swell of his hips. He pulls, and Daehyun gasps at the sweet, heady friction. “We found each other. Isn’t that enough?”

“You loved me before you found me,” Daehyun says breathily. Yongguk continues to push their hips together, helping them move in slow circles. “It’s a bit unfair.”

“They’re more of a burden than you think, the memories.”

Daehyun’s eyes are dark, his lips parted. Heat builds between them, hot breath damp on his skin. They help each other out of their thin clothes, and the sheets tangle and twist and lock their knees together. Daehyun’s bare skin is a gift. The weeks they have spent in the sun have bronzed him, and his time swimming long strokes in the ocean have started to slim and harden his muscles. The first few days, Daehyun had ached, but now there is a quiet strength to him that Yongguk finds addicting. Yongguk knows he has benefited from their time together, too. He feels sturdier and more secure, a deep root in the middle of a swell.

He rolls Daehyun onto his back and touches him, and Daehyun unfurls like a rose bud. Kissing, they slide against each other, hard flesh and soft noises, until they are sated, and then they come down together. Yongguk breaths through his mouth, watching the slow smile break over Daehyun’s face. “I love you,” Yongguk says, selfishly and longingly.

“I love you, too,” Daehyun says, light as air.

Guilt hounds at Yongguk’s chest, tightening his lungs. If Daehyun knew the whole truth, would he still love Yongguk? If he knew that loving Yongguk would bring about his ruin?

“I guess it’s alright that I don’t have the full memories,” Daehyun says quietly. “Since it means you will just have to tell me our stories, over and over again.” His eyes glitter with anticipation.

“Would you like to hear one now?”

“Tell me the one again where you were a general,” Daehyun demands, draping his arm over Yongguk’s waist, his smile impish. “I like that one.”

Yongguk begins their story. He has never told Daehyun their ends.

.

Yongguk is twenty-two and complacent that this is all he will ever have: his gang, his apartment, and his memories. It is enough. Not complete, but enough. He is nothing special and he will probably never amount to anything special, but he has a good head on his shoulders and people who care about him, and he can’t ask for anything more. And anyways, with the kind of life he’s leading, he shudders to think how he would meet the boy from his dreams this time around. Most likely looking down the barrel of his gun.

Youngjae bangs the door to Himchan’s room open and Yongguk barely looks up from where he is sitting on their couch meticulously cleaning the parts of his handgun on their coffee table. There is a certain ritual to it, and it’s hard to shake Yongguk once he has started. Remove the magazine. Ensure the weapon is unloaded. Dry fire the pistol. Field strip. Clean the barrel, the slide, the receiver. Check functionality of the pistol’s main components, among them the barrel, firing pin, extractor, and ejector. Lubricate. Reassemble.

Youngjae shakes out his hands, pushes them up underneath his armpits for warmth. They’ve got heating but it’s on the fritz, and they try not to use the space heater often. Yongguk swears that with three of them in their tiny apartment, they generate enough heat on their own.

“He’s in a _mood_ ,” Youngjae complains, chewing on his bottom lip and toeing into his shoes by the door. He shrugs into his coat. “If Himchan asks, tell him I’m staying over at Junhong’s.”

“You mean Junhong’s parents,” Yongguk amends for him, and he can sense Youngjae’s eyes rolling in response. Yongguk has never endorsed Junhong’s initiation into the gang. He thinks he is too young, still too young, and fully acknowledges the hypocrisy of his stance.

“Whatever,” Youngjae says, leaving.

Yongguk goes back to cleaning his pistol. Youngjae never officially moved in with them, but he spends most of his time here, and when he’s not here he’s with Junhong or Jongup, and Yongguk is fairly certain that Youngjae doesn’t have a place of his own.

Himchan stumbles out of his room then, dragging a hand over his mouth and scratching absently at his belly underneath his hoodie. He takes two steps to the kitchen and puts a kettle on. Then he opens and closes the cabinets, searching for something, sighing occasionally, slumping over the counter, until Yongguk gives in.

“What did you fight about this time?” he asks in a low voice, knowing Himchan wants to talk as he puts back together his gun.

Himchan turns with glittering eyes, and Yongguk waits for it.

“He wanted to blow me,” he says with the same sort of tone that one might say, “ _he ran over my puppy._ ”

“I don’t...understand.”

Himchan comes to drape himself dramatically by his side on the couch, and Yongguk grunts, checking the alignment on his machine. “Don’t get me wrong,” Himchan says, “he blew me, and it was great, but I just -- there’s just -- we’ve been doing this now for, what, couple of months? Almost a year? We’re practically cohabitating. And when we’re spooning after I say -- I say, let’s do something. Let’s go out. Let me take you out. And he just gives me this look like I’ve said the craziest thing. But it’s not crazy, is it?”

“Hm,” Yongguk agrees wisely.

“He was like a deer in headlights. Eyes huge. I said, forget it. Whatever. But he still freaked out.” At this point, Himchan has curled up in a fetal position around Yongguk’s back. He sighs as the kettle whistles. “I think he’s mad at me.”

“He’ll come around.”

“I just want it to mean something, you know?” Himchan mutters, barely discernable over the whistling kettle. “I want more than his pretty blow jobs.”

Yongguk turns to look down at where Himchan is laying his head near Yongguk’s thigh, and Himchan flinches, his hands coming up to ward off an attack. Yongguk smirks.

“Yeah,” Himchan continues with a pinched expression, finally rising from the couch to tend to the kettle. “I called his blow jobs pretty. Fuck me.”

“Pretty sure Youngjae will get mad if I do that,” Yongguk responds, deadpan. They are silent for a moment. The smell of instant coffee permeates their apartment, and soon Himchan returns with two steaming mugs. They drink.

“I just want it to mean something,” Himchan says again, and when he looks at Yongguk this time, his eyes are full and dark and Yongguk sees something in them that he recognizes. “You know what I mean?”

Yongguk thinks of the boy in his dreams, in the memories, in his writings, and he says, “Yeah, I know what you mean.”

.

The sea rises and falls. There is a chill in the air, a storm over the waters moving inland. Yongguk and Daehyun watch it approach like a gray mass for the better part of the morning, hunched against each other on the sand. They needed to get out of the motel room. _I feel like I’m suffocating,_ Daehyun confessed to him that morning, grinning, but the air was indeed stale and still, dead.

Now, the wind whips in their faces. Before long, they will need to go back inside to escape the torrential downpour.

“At the end of the week,” Daehyun begins to ask, “are we going home?”

Yongguk does not look at him for fear of seeing the hope and longing in his eyes. He swallows and his throat feels like sand is lodged in it. “I don’t know,” he says, not wanting to lie.

.

Yongguk is twenty three and their boss has been missing for four months now.

Things have changed. They are fairly certain that their boss isn’t coming back -- he’s gone away before, but never for this long and without establishing contact. Youngjae moved in. Yongguk moved out. He figured walking in on Himchan and Youngjae sucking face on their couch once was one time too many, and found another apartment, still small but also still in the neighborhood.

The apartment is something that he is quietly proud of, a thing he got on his own, a mark of his success as an adult. He is missing half of his heart, he tells himself, and yet he can do this: live.

Junhong slowly burrowed his way into the apartment with him after the kid’s parents decided kicking him out of the house would straighten him out. Yongguk doesn’t mind; Junhong contributes to rent when he can, and he is the kind of company that Himchan never could be: endearingly submissive, loyal, and _unobtrusive_. Junhong leaves Yongguk alone with his thoughts when he wants to be left alone with his thoughts, and he distracts him from them when Yongguk wants to be distracted from them. Yongguk can see why their boss liked him. Junhong’s main talent is his malleability. He can be whatever you need him to be, and he rarely puts up complaint.

Jongup is a mystery, still. The kid dances, and that is about all Yongguk knows of him yet. They’ve rarely interacted without Himchan as a medium, but even so Yongguk has seen and appreciated his unflappable nature, rare and welcome in a gang full of those who would purposefully try to shake things up in a power-play.

Yongguk is twenty three and he’s seen other members of the gang come and go, but there is always this core of them, this group he holds dear and close. The best of them.

“They want to meet with our leader,” Himchan says, a sharp pout on his lips. They’ve gathered in their apartment. Youngjae drapes a casual arm over Himchan’s shoulders, body curved protectively over Himchan’s hunched form. There’s a sliver of red along Himchan’s neck from where a knife ghosted over his skin, close. Too close. Yongguk stops a growl from leaving his lips as he regards the pair on the couch, knuckles white from clenching them tight as he stands over the small kitchen counter.

Junhong stares from his seat on the floor, and Jongup leans against him, skin still gleaming from the sweat he worked up at the dance studio. “Did they hurt you?” Junhong asks, his eyes wide. Yongguk can see his muscles jumping in his jaw, tense. He imagines them all as a pack of wolves, bristling with the need to protect each other from this outside threat.

“Just threatened,” Himchan says, rubbing a finger absently along the aggravated skin of his neck. “There were two of them. They didn’t seem interested in hurting me. If I had my knife, though--”

“Who were they?” Yongguk interrupts, not wanting to entertain images of Himchan lashing out against his attackers and consequently bleeding out from a stab wound in his gut.

Himchan blinks, attention redirected, and Youngjae shifts so that are sitting closer on the couch. “Couple of thugs,” Himchan says. “They said they’re a branch of the _Chil Sung Pa_ but I didn’t see their tattoos. Kids, really. I don’t think they were taking us seriously.”

An uneasy silence falls over the group.

A couple of months ago, this statement might have made them grumble, annoyed more than concerned that another group thought lowly of them, but Yongguk knows that ever since their boss went missing, their gang has grown lenient and almost benign.

A few members left, and the ones who stayed hovered around Yongguk like gnats, buzzing in his ear when they had news and sometimes even when they did not. They drifted toward him and sought his approval, usually only to be met with indifference or outright contempt. Yongguk handed out praise in tiny morsels, and it seemed that the rarity of it, his years with the gang, and his mask of calm authority all made him emerge as the most likely figure in charge.

They function well enough. Yongguk has never condoned violence for the sake of violence, and once everyone realized that, a tentative peace fell over their territory like a veil. Yongguk is not interested in gang politics; he is interested in protecting what’s his.

Knowing this, of course other gangs would try to move in.

Yongguk shifts his weight onto the counter, leaning on his elbows. “What did they say?”

“That they want to meet with our leader,” Himchan repeats shortly. He continues when he receives Yongguk’s chiding stare, mumbling most of it and trailing off towards the end: “They said they would take not meeting as a declaration of war.”

This time the silence is stifling. Junhong holds his breath as if he’s just been shoved into a vacuum, and all eyes turn to look at Yongguk.

 _War_.

Yongguk knows war. The weight of a weapon in his hands and the gritty stickiness of blood splashed across his face. Hearts pounding in sequence, the way your ears ring for days after close exposure to gunfire. How a body cools in your hands. He thinks of his friends, this group of boys who have become his family, being hunted in the streets and killed for wearing ink that marks them as members of _Baek Ahn Pa_.

“Hyung?” Junhong asks, light and hopeful. “What will we do?”

Yongguk knows war, and he won’t know it again if he can help it.

.

It rains for three days. The ocean churns and melds with the sky, enclosing them in a world of slate gray. Inside their motel room, Daehyun turns the shells on their windowsill this way and that, as if to catch the water falling from the dense clouds. The fan beats overhead. They sleep curled together, their forms twisting like the seashells they collected together.

.

Yongguk is twenty three and Himchan thinks this is a bad idea, but he can't think of a better one.

“They didn’t say the boss had to be alone,” Himchan tells him again in a low voice as they both take measured steps through their meeting point, a restaurant-bar that sits on neutral ground that is filled with cigarette smoke and the stench of alcohol. Men and women play cards around the little tables haphazardly arranged across the floor, guzzling white rice wine or knocking back shots of cheap soju. They are loud, and drunk, and hardly anyone notices the restaurant manager, a mousy man shorter than both Yongguk and Himchan, leading them through to the kitchens.

Yongguk says nothing. It’s useless to argue with Himchan at this point, since they are both here on location. He isn’t sure if anyone within the restaurant is keeping watch, eager to report back to their own gang any evidence of discord, so he keeps his mouth shut but only levels Himchan with a heavy stare, hoping the other man will remember to mind himself in front of a group they know little to nothing about. If they really are _Chil Sung Pa_ , they will have to be careful, and if they aren’t, they might have to be more so.

The mousy manager guides them into the kitchen and Yongguk sees Himchan eyeing the knives on display along the tiled walls, their hilts magnetized to the strip running over the counters. The din from the bar-area dims as the kitchen door swings shut, and then the manager leads them up creaking stairs sectioned off by a curtain of heavy, sliced plastic. The walls are narrow on either side, and more than once Yongguk feels Himchan’s breath on the back of his neck. They stick close together, just in case.

At the landing, there is another door. “Just through here,” the manager says in a squeaky voice. He makes no moves to enter. Instead, he circles around behind them, keeping the widest distance possible between their bodies, and then he dashes back down the stairs. They watch his shadow disappear around the corner.

“Is he scared of us, or of them?” Himchan asks Yongguk in a low whisper. The walls of the landing throw the question back like an echo, and Yongguk rolls his shoulders back, straightens his spine. He pats the handle of his gun tucked into the band of his pants, and Himchan does the same with his own.

“In there,” Yongguk says with a hint of apology in his voice, “you’re my second.”

“I know,” Himchan hisses, rolling his eyes. “I won’t do anything stupid.”

The door opens without either of them having touched it. On the other side stands a burly man with a shaved head who nods at them to enter. “Weapons?” he asks. It is more of a grunt than anything else.

Yongguk takes out his gun, heavy in the palm of his hand. He replaces it when the guard nods again, and Himchan goes through the same sequence.

“Anything concealed?”

Yongguk shakes his head but Himchan sighs and bends to roll up the leg of his jeans, where he’s hidden a small knife. He pulls his shirt up, too, to reveal a larger knife strapped securely around his ribs.

The guard pats them both down, but lets them keep their weapons, a tacit show of good faith. They’re only here to talk, after all. Besides, Yongguk is quick to note, he and Himchan are far outnumbered in his room, which is larger than he thought it would be, housing a heavy billiards table around which a group of young men and women are playing a serious game of _sagu_. Others fill the room in pairs or trios, smoking or drinking together. In all, Yongguk counts around fifteen other people.

When the guard has stepped away from them, the group playing _sagu_ pauses their game, and one of them steps forward, a cigarette dangling from his lips. The others form a wall behind him, and Yongguk sees a flash of ink at all of their necks, though he can’t make out their signs. Still, it means they are a real gang, and not just a couple of thugs who don’t know what they’re doing.

The one closest to them makes a show of pointing out his weapons, and even goes so far as to grin smugly while removing them: a gun from his waistband, knuckle dusters from his fingers, knives hidden in his sleeves. The message is clear. He won’t need them.

“You the boss?” the guy asks, a lazy drawl making his words drag. “I was expecting someone...bigger.” He’s not much bigger than Yongguk himself, but Yongguk can make out the hard lines of wiry muscle under his clothing, a dormant viciousness to his build, lean like a starved dog. He has black teardrops inked under his right eye, and patterns drawn all up his neck, and when he grins, his incisors flash gold. “Come. Let’s sit. Bring your friend.”

They sit at a small table in one corner of the room. Smoke swirls under the dim lights, and music filters through, an afterthought. They are brought a couple of beers, and one of the other men switches out their leader’s old cigarette for a fresh one, the orange flame igniting the tip. “No need to be so tense,” he says around it, and Yongguk watches ash fall from the end. His blood pulses in his fingertips, eager for something he doesn’t recognize. There’s an energy in here that makes him feel electrically alive, like he is a man scratching at the pall laid over his body. “We’re just here to talk, after all.”

Yongguk shifts forward in his seat, elbows wide on the table. Himchan has opted to remain standing, and hovers like a shield at his side. He’s taking his role as Yongguk’s second seriously. “So let’s talk,” Yongguk says.

“You’re a serious kind of guy,” says the other man. “I could tell that about you the moment you walked through the door.” He accentuates his speech with his hands, gesturing. “But that’s okay. I like that.”

Ash falls from his mouth. Beside Yongguk, Himchan bristles.

“I’m Junho,” he continues, grinning with his gold teeth. “I’m _Chil Sung Pa_.” He pulls the collar of his shirt down at his neck to reveal the tattoo marking gang membership, a band of seven black stars. “I saw you checking; you didn’t believe us at first, did you?”

Yongguk lets the question stew in the air and watches Junho’s eyes darken at the lack of response. The _Chil Sung Pa_ have a gang network across Busan with arms branching into Seoul and across South Korea and even across oceans into other countries. His mention of such a name is meant to instill fear, and Yongguk grants himself a small victory internally at the aggravation showing in the other’s features. Finally, Yongguk inclines his head and he tells him his name.

“See?” Junho says to the group that has clustered around them. “Serious. A man of few words. Some of you could learn from his example.” Nervous chuckling ripples across the group but dies out when Junho turns sharp eyes back to Yongguk. “I’m here to talk peace,” he says. “Since you came, I know you’re not interested in a war. Honestly, my flies have been buzzing around and I like what they’ve been telling me about you. You protect what’s yours. The people like you. I don’t see why we can’t be friends.”

He says it like a threat, and Yongguk narrows his eyes. “Friends?”

“Maybe ‘friends’ is a bit much. Here’s the thing: you’re not interested in expanding, and _Chil Sung Pa_ aren’t out to make more enemies. You don’t hurt me, and I have no reason to hurt you. Let’s be neighbors. Neighbors who check in on each other every once in a while. You understand, of course.”

Yongguk understands. Before his brain can get into the weeds of it, he understands. _Chil Sung Pa_ are huge and have a vast network they could call in at any moment, and his own group seem little more than the dirt under one’s shoe in comparison. Junho’s proposal is almost gracious. _Chil Sung Pa_ could easily wipe them off the map and set up shop the next hour, but Junho is giving them an out. A more prideful leader might not take it, but, like war, Yongguk has little use for pride. All Junho wants is to be able to supervise, and he will leave Yongguk’s little kingdom alone.

“Neighbors,” Yongguk agrees with another downward tilt of his chin.

“If you don’t touch what’s mine, I won’t touch what’s yours,” Junho says, his eyes lighting up. He gestures somewhere towards the opposite wall, and amid the shadows a slight figure emerges. “One of my favorite little flies will keep tabs. You’re welcome to do the same.”

The figure solidifies into that of a young man, and when he steps into the light, Yongguk’s heart stutters in his chest. His blood sings, and he knows now why he felt so different upon entering this room. Surely, everyone else must feel it, the way the room seems to curve inwards toward this figure, the center of everything. But Yongguk looks, and no one is amazed. Junho smirks and Yongguk tries to keep his body in check, but already his skin is prickling with the desire to be touched. His knees ache like he’s been standing for days. He trembles and rolls his shoulders back to mask the moment of weakness.

The young man’s high forehead narrows into a tapered chin, his small face carrying otherwise large features: expressive eyes and a strong nose and pouting lips. It is unsettling to see him in jeans and a simple black shirt, a leather jacket snug at his shoulders, when recently in Yongguk’s world-shaking dreams the other boy has been decked in a ragged military uniform.

A stranger to Himchan, but Yongguk would know him anywhere.

His eyes tilt at the corners as he takes Yongguk in. He stands solid and straight at Junho’s side, arms crossed, and Yongguk despairs to see him so blank, so disciplined and rigid. This can’t be the same boy who once hid him in his room, shut away behind a closet door as they both fought down giggles to evade notice of his strict poetry teacher, he thinks.

“Introduce yourself,” Junho orders, and Yongguk sees the soldier in the other boy, the one who knelt in the mud with him, who emptied his weapons of rounds with him, who shared his rations, his water, his cigarettes, his bed.

“Family name Jung. I’m Daehyun. It’s nice to meet you, Bang Yongguk.”

Something slots into place in Yongguk’s spine when Daehyun’s mouth forms around his name. He blinks and feels the universe shift. He remembers Daehyun as he has been, as he used to be, boyish and tan from the sun, his glittering smile, his demands and his desires and all the things that made him vibrant and full. He looks at this Daehyun, who bears ink and metal, and knows he will have to learn most of these things anew.

Junho says, “I want you to meet up once a week. Neutral ground is fine. We’ll let you know through Daehyun if we’ve noticed anything, if we suspect anything, if we need anything. _Chil Sung Pa_ has a notorious reputation, I know, but there’s really no reason why we can’t come to this agreement.”

Junho reminds Yongguk of oil, slick and suffocating. For now, the leader is minding his manners. Yongguk watches Daehyun’s face as Junho speaks and finds the way Daehyun presses his lips together familiar and comforting.

“What are you staring at?” Daehyun says with a little sneer, his arrogance an ill-fitting mask. Yongguk remembers when he had discovered Daehyun’s sensitive spot behind his left ear, how he liked to be kissed there, how a soft touch there would sap the anger from him almost immediately.

Yongguk shakes his head, bearing the chuckles from the group at the way he backs down so easily as Himchan shifts beside him. Daehyun frowns. Yongguk wonders if he can sense it, what they are to each other. "Nothing."

He had almost hoped never to meet him in his lifetime. Not now. Not like this.

.


	3. Chapter 3

When the rain clears and the clouds roll out, a weightless sort of feeling lingers, like shedding a heavy coat. The dark slate grey of the storm dissipates and leaves behind something shimmering and silver, dew drops collecting on petals and water pebbling on the smudged glass of their windows. Everything is damp and new and borne of water.

Daehyun opens the door and closes it again, laughing when a shiver prickles its way up his bare arms and naked chest, making his little hairs stand on end. “Colder than I expected,” he says, diving back into the bed with Yongguk, who simply lifts a corner of the blanket they were nestled under to bring Daehyun back under its folds.

Four weeks has passed too quickly; unbeknownst to Daehyun, Yongguk put down cash for another two weeks, the cash most of what he had left, hoping it would be enough. It feels foolish, out here away from everything, waiting for a threat Yongguk doesn’t know even exists, but he would rather be a fool than lose the man curled up close against his side right now.

“You’re quiet,” Daehyun complains, the cold tip of his nose bumping Yongguk’s cheek.

“Sleepy,” Yongguk explains, having kept the bone-wearing exhaustion plaguing him out of his thoughts and at bay. Every night he has dreamed of Daehyun’s death, each death more creative and violent than the last. A dark thing has curled its tendrils around his heart, squeezing whenever he looks at Daehyun, as though to tease: _soon. he will be taken soon._

“Nightmares,” Daehyun guesses, small hands coming up to cup Yongguk’s cheeks. His thumbs graze the tender skin under his eyes, and Yongguk’s eyelids flutter closed at the touch.

“Nothing I can’t handle.”

“Are they of me?”

Yongguk can imagine the expression on Daehyun’s face, his large doe eyes and lips pouting pink, a flush on his cheeks in case Yongguk is about to tell him he is wrong, that he is being stupid or thoughtless or selfish. These are Daehyun’s fears: inadequacy, and that he will be forgotten.

“They wouldn’t be nightmares then,” Yongguk says from a voice deep within his chest, and it is only half a lie.

Daehyun digs his thumbs into Yongguk’s cheeks, denting his flesh, the downtown of his lips at odds with the glimmer in his eyes. “It’s so weird when you’re being cheesy.”

Yongguk laughs, drawing back so that Daehyun’s hands leave him, though he can still feel the warmth of his thumbprints in his skin.

“Get back here,” Daehyun demands.

They kiss. Each time is not a new experience, but rather a return to the familiar, a homecoming as their lips touch. Yongguk kisses him until Daehyun opens, his jaw relaxed, and then he moves on, paying special attention to the spot behind Daehyun’s ear and the juncture of his neck and collarbone and the soft skin above his right nipple. Daehyun’s body is clay for Yongguk to mold, supple and yielding, and every breath that whispers from his open mouth across Yongguk’s skin only heightens his need for him.

Yongguk slips the elastic band of Daehyun’s boxers from his waist and helps him wriggle from the clothing, and then he quickly slips out of his own, the covers twisted at their feet. Their bodies slot together as Yongguk sucks a bruise into the side of Daehyun’s neck. When a chill wracks through Daehyun’s body, though, they pause, and Daehyun sends a baleful look up to the whirling blades of their ever-running ceiling fan. “Can we turn it off?” he asks, licking his lips.

Here, _we_ is a euphemism for _you_ , and Yongguk sighs but rolls over, clambering out of bed as Daehyun pulls the covers back to rights, and the switch goes _click_ and the air stills, silent. Dust settles. Under the covers, Daehyun hums happily.

“Kiss me,” Daehyun demands.

Yongguk grins. “Getting back to that.”

.

Yongguk is twenty three and his phone sits heavy and hot in his hand, the insides whirring. He must have looked at Daehyun’s number in his contacts at least a hundred times. The grated metal steps leading up to his apartment are harsh under his rear and he’s sure his skin must bear their marks by now, but still he doesn’t move. Daehyun’s number. He swipes his phone’s screen on again and pulls it up, mumbling the digits under his breath. His pulse swims up to his ears and he wonders if he should text him.

He sees Daehyun’s face when he closes his eyes, and his heart beats harder for it. It screams for his soulmate. That, Yongguk knows, is what they are, what they have always been. Two parts of a whole, incomplete without the other.

He feels magnetized toward him, now that he knows he exists in his world, in this time. Before discovering Daehyun, Yongguk had been adrift. Suddenly, he doesn’t know how he survived the past twenty three years without him. Suddenly, his senses seem sharper, the sky more blue. He wonders if Daehyun feels the same indecipherable pull.

He should text him.

A grin worms across his lips even though Yongguk tries to fight it, and he slaps his phone against his forehead in embarrassment. Like a dumb kid with a crush! But he’s waited his whole life for this, and the embarrassment quickly passes.

However, as he’s pulling up his number to text, Daehyun’s face flashes in his mind’s eye again, only this time it is the face from his memories. Daehyun’s face caked in mud and blood, eyes wide and dark and staring and soulless as bullets and fire rain from the sky. Daehyun’s lips pale and blue as the breath stills and dies in his lungs. Daehyun’s grip falling slack from Yongguk’s arm, and Yongguk looking down only to see that he’s gone.

Daehyun’s death. It is Yongguk’s most familiar nightmare.

Yongguk swipes his phone screen off again, lips pressed together in a thin line. Perhaps this time it can be different. He can be strong. He can _refuse_ to be the cause of Daehyun’s suffering and death. It would be selfish of him to text, to call. Junho expects them to meet regularly for updates, but perhaps Yongguk can send someone else in his stead. Maybe he can keep Daehyun safe in this lifetime. Safe from him.

Before he can commit himself to heartbreak, though, his phone buzzes in his hand. A text message appears.

 _daehyun says:_  
_r u free?_

Yongguk looks up at the sky, imagines he can see the stars behind the blanket of light blue. The sky seems to close in on him as he debates answering, but the pull sharpens, and Yongguk responds.

 _yongguk says:_  
_right now? yes_

Their fates are written, Yongguk thinks, hunched over and gripping his phone in both hands now, like the paths of those stars, endlessly circling until there is nothing left of them. How cruel. How wonderful. This part is easy. What comes after is unthinkable.

 _daehyun says:_  
_meet me. 20 minutes._

Daehyun sends the name of a cafe on neutral ground, and Yongguk’s legs start walking of their own accord. He’s there in fifteen, his heart fluttering like a bird trying to escape a birdcage. He wipes a trickle of sweat away from his temple, and then he sees Daehyun seated in a corner, oblivious to the world, his head bent low over something on the table, a pen in his hands moving quickly.

Yongguk watches him, slowly entering the cafe as streams of people weave around him. Daehyun sticks his tongue out in concentration, chews on his lips, scratches his head. He glances at his phone a couple of times, and after a few minutes, he finally looks up.

Their eyes meet, coordinated, and Yongguk almost takes a step back at the brightness in the other’s. Daehyun stands, hastily putting away his things into a book bag. He’s wearing a simple outfit of a black shirt and jeans and a backwards cap, and aside from a concealed weapon Yongguk is sure is on Daehyun’s body somewhere, he looks like he could be a student at a local college. Maybe he is.

“How long were you standing there?” Daehyun says accusingly, only sitting when Yongguk has taken the seat across from him. “Creep.”

“I just got here,” Yongguk returns.

“Liar.” Daehyun crosses his arms, his shoulders rigid. His body is a small bundle of tenseness, eyes sparking.

“What did you want to talk about?” Yongguk asks, trying not to find everything about Daehyun endearing in this moment. They are strangers, Yongguk reminds himself. Daehyun doesn’t know anything about him other than that he is another gang’s supposed leader.

Daehyun looks uncertain. He looks at something past Yongguk’s shoulder before refocusing his attention. The look passes a chill through Yongguk. “Who are you?”

“Uh,” Yongguk says with some difficulty. “Bang Yongguk. Head of _Baek Ahn Pa_. Remember, we met--”

“I’m not stupid,” Daehyun says with a huff, clearly insulted. He glares. “I mean, who _are_ you? I know you. Your face. I’m good with faces. Where have I seen you before?”

Yongguk remains silent, but his blood and thoughts are churning. Daehyun has never remembered, before. Maybe, this time, it really will be different. “Um.”

“Have you ever been to Busan?” Daehyun asks him, snapping his fingers and lips curling up at the corners, caught up in his own cleverness. “Maybe I saw you there?”

Yongguk shakes his head, and disappointment makes Daehyun’s figure droop rapidly. “It could just be a weird feeling of deja vu?”

“Weirder than deja vu,” Daehyun says.

A beat of silence passes over them. Yongguk fidgets, which is strange. He’s not the type to fidget. “Was there anything else?” he asks, at odds with himself. He wants to know him, but he’s afraid to. That Daehyun finds him familiar, though, gives him a sense of hope. “Did Junho have anything--”

“No,” Daehyun says quickly. “I just wanted to see you.”

He doesn’t seem to realize how that sounds. Yongguk feels his cheeks grow hot as Daehyun waves down someone to take their order. Yongguk hadn’t realized they would be ordering and quickly glances at the menu.

“I’ll have a chocolate-hazelnut milkshake, please,” Daehyun says sweetly to their server, plastering a smile onto his face. “What are you getting?”

“A coffee,” Yongguk says more out of reflex than anything else. “Thanks.”

Daehyun wrinkles his nose but sits back as their server leaves them. His arms are crossed again. He regards Yongguk with sharp eyes, and then he says, “It’s going to bother me forever.”

Yongguk itches to tell him: _You are in all my dreams. We’ve lived and loved together for lifetimes. I would know your face in the dark, your voice in a vacuum,_ but he can guess how that would come across. Crazy.

He settles for the coffee the server brings him, and Daehyun slurps noisily at his milkshake.

His cheeks hollow as he sucks hard at the straw. Yongguk clears his throat and Daehyun’s eyelashes flutter against his cheeks as he raises his eyes to look at him. He pulls off, licking his lips. “What?”

“Nothing.”

Daehyun grunts. “So, what’s your deal?”

“What do you mean?”

“What’s your sob story? How’d you get involved in this life? You’re pretty young to be a boss, you know.”

“Junho is, too.”

Daehyun waves a hand at the statement. “Junho’s the son of someone important in the mafia. Oh, I probably wasn’t supposed to tell you that.” He covers his mouth with his hand, staring at Yongguk.

Yongguk smiles, amused by Daehyun’s sharp playfulness, at odds with the figure he presented when they’d been in front of the gang. “I can keep a secret.”

“No, you should tell me one, now,” Daehyun insists. “That’s how this works.”

Yongguk wracks his brain for one, but the biggest secret in the forefront of his mind right now is their story. He retraces their conversation briefly and decides to answer one of Daehyun’s previous questions with as much simplicity as possible. “I had a twin brother,” he says, heart twisting at the thought of Yongnam, even though so many years have passed. “He died. My family broke apart, and I joined a gang.”

Daehyun pauses in enjoying his milkshake, sympathy hidden under a layer of insouciance in his eyes. “That’s rough,” he says, coughing a little.

“It got better,” Yongguk tells him. “Your turn.”

Daehyun thinks for a while, sipping absentmindedly at his milkshake. Finally, he says, “I live with my brother. My parents aren’t dead or anything. We’re just poor, and we don’t really get along. They’re in Busan. I wanted to go to school in Seoul, and my brother was here. He was already in the gang. One thing led to another, I guess.”

Yongguk drinks his coffee, and Daehyun gulps down his milkshake. Halfway through their conversation, he gets a brainfreeze and conversation halts. Yongguk has learned that Daehyun is an art student, that he joined the gang only because his brother is also in it, that he thinks Junho might have some anger issues, and that Yongguk should tread lightly.

Yongguk, for his part, has mostly only told him about Himchan, his best friend. He thinks his life has been uninteresting before this moment, he and Daehyun together in this cafe, watching Daehyun nurse his brainfreeze.

When the glass Daehyun is drinking from is empty, the younger man says, “I don’t know why I’m telling you all of these things. But I can’t seem to help myself.” He squints at Yongguk, the skin under his eyes bunching. He has that mole there under his left eye. Yongguk remembers how it feels to brush his thumb over it.

“It’s all right,” Yongguk says. Daehyun’s lips twitch into an unsteady smile, but at least it seems sincere.

On the table, Daehyun’s phone vibrates, then starts to play a melody. “It’s my brother,” Daehyun says before answering the call. Yongguk tries not to eavesdrop, but he can hear Daehyun’s brother’s raised voice shouting through the speakers from this close distance.

“Where the fuck are you?”

“Out,” Daehyun says. He turns his body slightly to shield the call from Yongguk, but it doesn’t work as effectively as he probably hoped.

“You didn’t tell me.”

“Sorry, hyung. I forgot.”

“Like hell,” his brother says. “We’re all meeting, and you’re late. If you had told me where you were, like you’re supposed to, this wouldn’t have happened.” His brother says more, and Daehyun nods wordlessly, his shoulders slowly drooping as he’s berated over the phone.

Finally, he simply says, “Sorry,” and hangs up. He grabs his book bag and stands, swinging it over his shoulders quickly. “I have to go.”

“Was he very mad?”

Daehyun shrugs, and Yongguk doesn’t like it, how his features seemed to have dimmed from that short interaction. “It’ll be fine. I just messed up a little. It’ll be fine.” His feet shuffle in place. “Hey, it was nice talking to you, though,” he says, his cheeks flushing.

Yongguk feels something in his chest start to soar. He feels like a wind-up clock that has just been wound and freed, finally able to do what he’s meant to do. He tells Daehyun it was nice talking to him, too. He tells him they should meet up again. They don’t have to talk gang business, right? Daehyun shrugs again at that, frowning, and then he leaves.

The server comes back then and gives Yongguk the bill. He pays it, hope making him feel like a hot-air balloon.

.

By the ocean, the waves black as space, Yongguk dreams of his previous lives. He scans through his memories and latches onto the patterns within them, flipping through the memories like pages in a book, stopping here and there to reminisce or analyze more closely. They have lived five lifetimes, and Yongguk remembers them all. He is determined to have this one count above the rest. He has lined up what he knows, in order: they meet, they fall in love, they live, they die. Daehyun is taken from him, a page ripped from his book, and his absence is a jagged edge in the seam of his memories. Sometimes his death is wrought with pain, and Yongguk is left with his echoing screams. Sometimes his death is silent, and Yongguk doesn’t know which is worse. The moment he passes is the moment Yongguk loses the rest of what he knows. Their book ends. Perhaps he doesn’t live much longer than Daehyun; for him, there isn’t much point to.

This time, he won’t let Daehyun be taken from him. He _won’t_. Fuck the stars. He will not be careless. He will not let him out of his sight.

By his feet on their bed, Daehyun mimes sleep. Yongguk knows he is not really asleep, because his chest does not rise and fall with the deep slow drag of breath, but remains still like he has been turned to stone, a sure sign that he is thinking too hard about his breathing cycle.

The past few days have strained them. The sun is out again, and Daehyun wants to go home. Yongguk prolongs their stay with promises of discovering new places to eat, things to do. “Let’s be together like this a little longer,” he always says, and breathes out a sigh of relief when Daehyun considers this and acquiesces, obedient for now. After all, all Yongguk wants is more time.

Today, though, Daehyun has been ignoring him, their interactions frosty like winter nipping at their feet, like the storm that passed over them settled instead right under Daehyun’s skin. The television is on but instead of watching the screen Yongguk watches the way the light plays over Daehyun’s body, how it glances off his bare shoulder or disappears into shadow. Gradually, the planes of light begin to connect as Daehyun turns to face him.

His eyes are dark. He does not want to pretend anymore. “How much longer are we staying?” he asks Yongguk, his voice a crackling thing like the shock of lightning in a clear night sky.

Yongguk swallows, his throat suddenly dry faced with those eyes. His back pressed up against pillows, he feels himself begin to sink. “A little longer--”

“I really mean,” Daehyun interrupts, turning around again to face the television, showing his back to Yongguk -- out of defiance or fear, Yongguk cannot tell. “How much longer are you going to keep me here?”

Yongguk’s breath freezes in his chest. Static from the television creeps over them. Daehyun lets their silence drag on, until there is ice in Yongguk’s lungs. If only Daehyun knew the power he holds over him.

“I’m going for a walk,” Daehyun announces, jolting up from the bed and making the springs creak. His shoulders are hunched, defensive, and he moves quickly enough that Yongguk cannot protest. And what, even, would Yongguk protest? You can’t go out there. Stay in here with me, where it is safe, where I can watch over you, where I can hoard you against my chest. Daehyun takes Yongguk’s hoodie with him and swiftly tugs it over his arms. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. I’ll be back in a bit.”

“Take your phone,” Yongguk says, his voice making them both pause. Daehyun’s eyes soften; even if he is upset, he can’t stay so for long.

Daehyun takes his phone. He closes the door softly behind him, and Yongguk hopes he doesn’t stray too far.

.

Yongguk is twenty three and in free fall. At night, he dreams of Daehyun and the dreams are good; death is a far, far thing and no longer his concern, because Daehyun is here and full of blood and life and the inexplicable desire to see Yongguk.

“Junho went across the river today,” Daehyun says to him over the phone, and it means nothing, this sharing of information, other than that Daehyun has time, and he is choosing to spend it on the phone with Yongguk. “He’s been going quite often.”

“Has he, now,” Yongguk muses, a smile threatening to bust his lips. Junhong is home from school, and he gathers up his books and pens from the coffee table to retreat into his small bedroom out of respect without a word from the older man. Yongguk watches the head of blond curly hair disappear behind the door and lifts two fingers in thanks. A blush erupts across Junhong’s cheeks as the door closes with more force than necessary.

“Now you,” Daehyun insists. Ever since that first time in the cafe, Daehyun has kept up this pretense of sharing secrets as the only way they can communicate with each other. Yongguk finds it both unnecessary and adorable.

“That’s hardly news,” Yongguk says. “Anyone could have told me that.”

“But it wasn’t anyone. It was me.”

Yongguk closes his eyes and sees Daehyun as a young farmhand, his skin dark from the sun, on his knees with palms upturned in front of him. _It was me_ , he says, proud and determined and lying. _I planned the trick and let the fox in. Eunbi did nothing. She did nothing._ The punishment had been severe, and Yongguk had carried it out himself. He had begged forgiveness. That was the first time he’d made Daehyun bleed. He shakes his head to rid himself of the memories, just as Daehyun whines into the phone.

“Hyung, it’s your turn!”

Yongguk lets the couch receive him, its cushions soft and worn. “Himchan bought Youngjae a cactus,” Yongguk offers. “Told him it was reflective of his personality.”

“How is that anything important!” Daehyun immediately returns, and Yongguk wonders where he is right now, if he’s dangling halfway off his bed making faces at the phone, if he had been working on a project for school somewhere and needed a break. Static filters through from the other side, and he hears Daehyun grumble. It sounds like wind.

“It’s not especially, except that I’m the one telling it to you.” Yongguk grins. His grins come easy, these days. Himchan has even noticed, once commenting on how unsettling his face is when he’s smiling like that, unprompted. Not that he doesn’t enjoy seeing Yongguk happy.

Static again. Daehyun curses softly under his breath, the word barely discernable, and Yongguk furrows his brows in sudden, sharp concern. He feels a pull in his chest and wonders if the other boy can feel the same.

“Where are you?”

A pause. Yongguk recognizes that Daehyun is negotiating this break in their routine, weighing the pros and cons of answering, deciding what is secret and what is not. Finally, he says, “Just some park. It’s windy out,” and Yongguk feels his breath leave him in a slow, relaxing trickle, infinitely pleased. “...What are you doing?”

“Nothing. It’s my day off.”

“From the gang?”

Yongguk chuckles. “No, from my job. I work at a restaurant.”

“Oh,” Daehyun says, sounding disappointed. “Big bad gang leader by night, restaurant staff by day. What a life.”

“It’s enough,” Yongguk says, thinking about Himchan and the others, about his apartment, and now about Daehyun. It’s enough. “What about you? What’s your day job?”

“I’m a student,” Daehyun says as if it’s obvious. “And it’s not -- I go along with what my brother does because I live with him. He’s my hyung, you know? And he’s -- gonna look out for me. So I help him out this way. I’m not going to be in the gang forever; at least, I hope.” A beat of silence. “I don’t know why I told you that.”

“Maybe because you trust me?” Yongguk posits cautiously, wanting very much to implant that seed in Daehyun’s mind.

“I don’t even know you.”

“You know me enough.”

“ _Enough_ ,” Daehyun says, his speech fast and clipped. “Everything’s just _enough_ for you. Don’t you have any big dreams?”

“What is this, an interview?” Yongguk teases, sensing that Daehyun is becoming agitated. Instead of blowing up from the gentle jibe, Daehyun seethes silently and Yongguk feels for a moment that he is trying to grasp water with just his hands. He says, hopeful and much too quickly, “Do you want to meet up?”

Immediately he wishes he could take it back. What if Daehyun says no? Would Yongguk beg? Would he embarrass himself and plead?

“We’re only supposed to meet once a week,” Daehyun says slowly.

Yongguk grins. “We haven’t met yet this week.”

“You have nothing to share with me other than that Himchan bought a prickly plant,” the other boy protests, yet there is a lightness to his tongue that Yongguk can detect. “It will be a waste of a meeting.”

“We don’t have to talk about the gang,” Yongguk says. He scratches his knee with his free hand, playing with the fraying denim there. “I don’t want to talk about the gang.”

Daehyun breathes loudly on the phone, and Yongguk counts. He pulls a string free and snaps it off with his fingers.

Daehyun’s voice is soft when he responds. “I...I don’t know. What if someone finds out? What will we do?”

“No one will find out,” Yongguk says quickly, realizing that he has indeed been reduced to begging, or at least its near cousin. “No one is going to examine our meetings so closely. Besides, aren’t we supposed to be friends? Isn’t that what Junho said?”

“Neighbors,” Daehyun whispers.

A long, stilted silence follows. They have reached an impasse. Yongguk’s heart overflows in his chest, pace quickening like he is about to go into battle.

“I,” Yongguk says, uncertain.

“There’s a bookstore,” Daehyun interrupts, words spilling from his mouth. “There’s a bookstore in Edae we can go to. No one will be there. I can text -- no, it’s better if I just tell you.”

Daehyun tells him the location, and Yongguk repeats it back to him.

They meet at the bookstore, and Yongguk grins at Daehyun’s little cloth mask over the bottom half of his face that doesn’t hide the way he blushes. They browse the bookshelves, having quiet conversation with each other that ebbs and flows naturally. Of course, Yongguk knew they would compliment each other well, but even he is surprised by how close Daehyun hovers, their shoulders and fingers brushing. He flushes a sweet pink every time their eyes meet, and Yongguk reminds himself that for Daehyun, this is new and fresh and a little bit forbidden; for Yongguk, this is the only reason he is ever reborn.

They continue to meet -- in little bookstores, record shops, cafes, and bars. Anywhere under the radar. The weather warms and so do they to each other. Daehyun takes Yongguk to an art exhibit and Yongguk doesn’t have the heart to tell him he’d seen it before and thought of him, not if it means seeing the sparkle in Daehyun’s eyes flicker and die in disappointment. Many times, he catches Daehyun staring at him, an odd, pensive look on his face that quickly melts into a smile when he realizes he has been caught.

That is the smile that Yongguk loves, the boy Yongguk loves.

When all the snow has melted, Yongguk brings Daehyun to his apartment. Junhong has left to spend the weekend at Himchan and Youngjae’s, and Yongguk has the place to himself. Though he didn’t bring him over with any sort of intentions, Yongguk can’t help but feel giddy with excitement. Here, Daehyun, he thinks. Here is where I live, where I eat, where I sleep and dream of you. Come in. You are a part of this space now.

The apartment seems to welcome him with a sigh, like the structure of the building straightens as he enters, and Daehyun puts his shoes right next to Yongguk’s at the entrance, two neat pairs. “So this is you, huh?” he asks nonchalantly, though his eyes are quickly darting from place to place, taking it all in.

“This is me,” Yongguk announces, pleased, refreshed. He pushes Daehyun gently into his living room area and instructs him to sit on his beat up couch, trying not to outright giggle when Daehyun sits in his own sunken groove of a seat. “Why don’t you make yourself comfortable while I see if there’s anything I can scrounge up for dinner?”

He busies himself with preparations in the kitchen. He only turns his back for a moment, rummaging through their refrigerator, but when he straightens to ask if Daehyun prefers green or red peppers, there is no one in the living room. Fear clutches at his heart, but he tames it immediately, reminding himself not to be irrational. There’s no way anything serious could have happened. “Daehyun?”

There is no response. Yongguk puts down his things and investigates, padding out of the kitchen. “Daehyun?”

Still nothing, but his bedroom door is ajar. A heavy feeling settles in the basement of his stomach, and he pushes the door open.

Beyond it, he sees Daehyun startle, his eyes huge in the weak light let in through the shades of Yongguk’s room. He clutches something tightly to his chest -- Yongguk’s little leather journal -- and the knot of his throat bobs as he swallows.

Daehyun says, “I don’t know what it was. I was pulled to it.” He holds the journal up, turning it in his hands. “It was on your nightstand. I read some of it. Yongguk, how is this possible?” He shakes like a leaf, and Yongguk leads him to sit on his bed. Daehyun follows him, a trembling thing.

“How much did you read?” Yongguk asks, thinking of the inked pages in the back, the ones so filled with his angry and depressed scratches and scribbles that they are all nearly black, littered with his death. He takes the journal from his hands and tucks it safely away into a drawer.

“I felt something, you know?” Daehyun ignores Yongguk’s question, eyes wide. “I felt something the moment I saw you. I didn’t know what it was. A connection; I knew you. I _knew_ you. The farmboy, the general, the soldier. Our stories, you’ve written them all down.”

“Did you know them, too?” Yongguk asks, carefully hopeful, taking Daehyun’s shaking hands. They sit cross-legged on the bed, face to face. “Our stories?”

“No, but I recognized them. Like I’d written them myself. Oh, Yongguk.”

Daehyun is crying, but Yongguk knows it is not from reading his death, and he is grateful to have this secret from him still. He wipes at Daehyun’s tears with his thumbs, and then he draws their faces close together and kisses him once on the lips, and they are salty like the ocean.

.

Daehyun has been gone for over an hour. Yongguk itches for his return, feels a piece of him fracture and disintegrate for every minute that passes without him. The sun is sinking and Yongguk’s bones grind against each other when he goes to peer beyond the curtains at the window, forcing himself still when he sees nothing.

Daehyun needed space, and Yongguk has to prove that he can give it to him. This is new to him, Yongguk reminds himself. Every lifetime for Daehyun they start nearly fresh, a forming flower bud that requires care and water and sun to open and bloom. It is not the same for Yongguk. His is a dense forest of memories and he wanders like a ghost from bough to bough of each tree, hoping for a break in the canopy.

His phone rings, calling him away from the window, and he picks it up quickly when he sees Daehyun’s name flash across the screen.

“Daehyun.” His name is more a sigh than anything else, as though a spell to summon him back.

“I’m at the Quikfil right when you get off the highway,” he says. “Come pick me up.”

.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapters will be slower to come following this one. Thanks for reading. Please let me know what you think <3


	4. a breath

Yongguk is twenty three and kissing Daehyun is everything he thought it would be, sweet and feeling beyond measure. If Daehyun were a well he could drink from him forever.

“Junho still thinks I’m keeping tabs on you,” Daehyun says with a sly grin. His hair is all over the place but his head is in Yongguk’s lap. Yongguk combs his fingers through that wild hair, knowing he won’t be able to tame it. They quickly decided that Yongguk’s apartment was the safest place to meet like this, and Yongguk discovered early on how well Daehyun responds to touch, like he is starved of it, how he curves against a palm and tries to fit himself against whatever you will give him. Yongguk sits on his bed with a lapful of boy and marvels at how much Daehyun trusts him.

“Does he suspect anything?”

Daehyun turns his face into Yongguk’s knee, humming quietly. “I don’t think so. I’m a good liar. I tell him you’re laying low. That you’re worried about making him mad. He likes that.” Yongguk scratches lightly against his scalp, and he curls up like a satisfied kitten. “Oh, there, please.”

Yongguk grins, retracing the path of his fingers to scratch behind Daehyun’s ear. “You always like this spot. I wonder what that’s about.”

“Another advantage you have over me,” Daehyun murmurs sleepily. “How is it fair?”

“It isn’t,” Yongguk breathes.

Daehyun’s words slur together in his haze when he demands, “Tell me another story.”

“I’ve told them all,” Yongguk says past the lump in his throat. He has told parts of them all. The good parts, the parts where they are in love, and happy, and alive.

“Then tell me again -- the farms, you must have another story.”

Yongguk stops his fingers and Daehyun protests, turning his cheek, whining, until Yongguk starts the slow scratching again. “There was this one time,” he begins, “you kept trying to draw water from our well, but there was a little hole in the pail and you didn’t understand why there was so much less water when you returned.”

Daehyun turns to face him sharply, his eyes narrowed and incredulous. “I couldn’t have been that stupid,” he says.

“To be fair,” Yongguk teases, “we’d had a late night the night prior…”

A blush erupts across Daehyun’s cheeks like a smear of paint. “You’re lying.”

“I would never lie to you,” Yongguk promises, still grinning.

“You would, and you have,” Daehyun says with certainty. The blush only grows stronger across the bridge of his nose. Yongguk wonders if he is thinking of them, together like that, if he is thinking about Yongguk pushing into his body and kissing him until he falls apart. “But it’s okay. Everybody does.”

Yongguk leans down to kiss him, their mouths wet against each other. Daehyun kisses him like a man drowning, though Yongguk isn’t sure if it is to be saved or to pull him down into the depths with him. He feels something stir deep inside of him, like a door opening, like he is making space for Daehyun to crawl inside.

.


	5. Chapter 5

The way back takes longer than getting there, or maybe it is just the silence he is unused to, the thickness of it like the knot of a tie at the base of Yongguk’s throat. He swallows and the knot gets tighter. The car hums all around them like a living, breathing thing, while Daehyun squeezes himself up against the passenger-side window, his skin oddly pale.

“What did you do?” Yongguk winces at the gravel of his voice, harsh over the purr of the engine. “You were gone for a while.”

He thinks Daehyun will ignore him, but Daehyun sighs and mumbles, “I called Himchan.”

“Oh.” Yongguk keeps his eyes on the road, carefully managing his reactions.

Daehyun says, “I almost told him to come pick me up, instead of you.” He sees Daehyun’s eyes flicker over to him in the rearview mirror, and they stare through each other for just a moment; in that moment he sees Daehyun as he met him months ago, a boy standing beside his gang’s leader, made of ink and metal. Barriers up, snarl living just under the skin of his lips. “Maybe I should have.”

“Don’t.” Yongguk’s lips move before thought, the knot traveling down to tighten around his chest at the sight.

“Don’t _what_ ,” Daehyun snaps, color gradually filling his cheeks like two ripe cherries. “Don’t _what_ , Yongguk? You’ve got to give me something. We’ve been here for weeks. Why are we here? Why can’t we go back home? I never thought I’d say this, but I miss your dumb creaky sofa and the way it smells. I want to _go home_.”

“I know,” Yongguk says evenly, though his foot presses down on the accelerator. “I know you want to go home. I’m sorry. We can’t go home -- maybe ever. I’m trying--”

“What?” Daehyun says, loud and cutting, eyes huge.

“--to protect you. I’m trying to protect you!” His knuckles feel like they’re about to split from how tightly he’s gripping the wheel, and the engine revs in warning before Yongguk backs off on the accelerator, slowing them down.

“From _what_?” Daehyun asks him desperately, his voice breaking as they pull into the lot in front of the motel. “You’re not telling me anything. I hate this. I hate the lying. What do you mean, we can’t go home ever?”

He feels like a man floating in the middle of the ocean, something catching around his ankle and dragging him down. He shuts off the engine, and the car sputters and dies. They sit there in the stiff air and it feels like suffocating. Yongguk is afraid to answer, recognizes this as a turning point. He has been content keeping Daehyun in ignorance for so long, and already he can imagine the betrayal in Daehyun’s eyes when he finds out. You’ve done this to me, he’ll say. It’s your fault.

Yongguk lets go of the steering wheel, and his hands fall into his lap. “There’s something I have to tell you,” he says, “but it might be better to show you instead.”

Daehyun’s lips are a tight, thin line. They get out of the car. Daehyun follows Yongguk back into their motel room, to the side of the bed, watches him kneel to drag out the duffel bag underneath it. The older man plunges his hand into the mouth of the bag, and takes out two journals. “I’ve read those,” Daehyun reminds him, a reluctant anger sparking behind his eyes. Yongguk just looks so sad.

“Here,” Yongguk says. He flips one open to the back, where the lines are dug into the pages, where the scrawl is barely legible, where everything is bitter and dark and scratched out. “This is the end of our story.”

Daehyun sits on the bed. He draws breath, and he reads.

.

Yongguk is twenty three and sunlight spills over Daehyun’s shoulder like molten gold, his back hunched, his tongue peeking out between his lips in concentration.

“You’ll get a cramp like that,” Yongguk says, grinning at the sight. He will never grow tired of seeing Daehyun curled up on his bed, working, sleeping, eating, playing, fucking. Right now, he has a tablet in his lap, working the stylus over it in quick strokes as he finishes up a graphics assignment for school. Yongguk could say he is quite pleased at how often Daehyun comes by his apartment now, instead of going to the library, just to be here like he wants to soak up Yongguk’s essence.

“You can massage it out for me,” Daehyun returns. He scratches at his forehead, wrinkling his brow for a moment and staring at the screen of his laptop in consternation before resuming his work.

Yongguk wonders if that’s what he looks like when he writes, totally absorbed and impassioned. He thinks not, since he’s writing at the moment, leaning back against his desk chair that he pulled up beside his mattress to be closer to the other boy, and still he's absorbed in the boy on his bed. He tosses his pen at him for attention.

Daehyun squawks, concentration lost. “Hey!”

“Are you staying for dinner?” Yongguk nudges him with his foot.

“Was going to,” Daehyun says, “but seriously rethinking now that I’ve been violently assaulted.” Yongguk rolls his eyes, and Daehyun puts his tablet aside, cheeks swelling as he grins. “Don’t roll your eyes at me, hyung!”

“You roll your eyes all the time!”

“That’s because I’m the brat,” Daehyun explains. “As your dongsaeng, I’m allowed certain things.”

“I don’t know about that,” Yongguk mutters, but it gets lost with the sudden staccato of knocking on his front door.

Their eyes meet. Daehyun asks, “Are you expecting someone?”

Yongguk shakes his head. They hear Junhong going to investigate the front door, his slow measured steps with his huge feet. Junhong greets their visitor, but then there’s a scuffle.

“No, you can’t--” Junhong says, and that’s all it takes for Yongguk to jump to his feet, for Daehyun to start hastily putting things away into his back pack. “You can’t come in. You can’t just walk in -- what the hell--”

Yongguk’s bedroom door crashes open, and time freezes.

A man stands in the doorway, his features familiar but all out of sync, even as Junhong tries to squeeze between him and the frame to intervene. Yongguk’s fists clench, and his stance balances on instinct, and his blood starts to warm as his pulse quickens. Dust motes spin in the air.

“Hyung,” Daehyun says in a tiny voice, and that’s when the world starts again.

“Fuckin’ knew I’d find you here, you little shit traitor,” Daehyun’s brother growls, lunging for him. Yongguk is there, but he is of little use. Daehyun’s brother is an object of single purpose, and he throws his whole weight behind his movements. He shoves Yongguk to the side and takes Daehyun’s upper arm in a rough grip, jostling him to stand and pushing him toward the door.

“Hyung,” Daehyun is protesting, his bag dangling from the crook of his elbow. Shock is clear in his features as the blood drains from his face. “Wonbin, please, I can explain--”

“Shut up,” he yells over his younger brother. “You’re lucky it was me who found you, and not Junho. You’re fuckin’ lucky.” He gives Daehyun another unnecessary shove, and Yongguk feels a growl rip from his throat.

“ _Let him go_.”

“Or what,” Wonbin says, squaring his shoulders back. He’s about the same size as Yongguk, though his anger and sickening righteousness give him more presence.

But Yongguk is not afraid, even if his heart is pounding. “ _Let him go_.”

Suddenly there is a horrible pressure on his windpipe. Yongguk coughs, blinks, and stares down at Wonbin, who has moved like a snake and pressed him against the wall, his forearm hard against his throat. He sees the gun in his hand, and motions quickly at Junhong to stand down.

Daehyun pulls at his brother’s elbow, panicked, pleading. “Don’t -- I’ll come with you -- I’ll come with you right now just put your gun down -- no, no, no--”

“I don’t like the way you look at me,” Wonbin says to Yongguk. Quickly, he shifts and presses the barrel of his gun to Yongguk’s forehead. Daehyun’s pleading is suddenly something very far away, like an echo of an echo, as blood hammers in Yongguk’s ears. He raises his hands. He feels the cool metal warming and wonders what oblivion would feel like without Daehyun.

“Stop this!” Daehyun screams, giving his brother a mighty heave. “Let’s just go -- let’s go. Leave them alone. Come on.”

Wonbin shifts again, catching Daehyun tight around the shoulders, possessive. His gun gleams at eye level. He spits on Yongguk’s floor. “If I see you with him again,” Wonbin says, “I’ll kill you.”

Yongguk keeps his hands raised, and as they cross the threshold of his room, Junhong does the same. He can’t believe what is happening. Their story can’t end here; it’s only just begun. A massive sadness swells up inside of him that threatens to eat him whole. “Daehyun--”

“Don’t, Yongguk,” Daehyun says, shutting him down entirely. “I’m sorry.”

His heart breaks when Daehyun doesn’t look back.

.


	6. Chapter 6

Yongguk is twenty three and Daehyun will not answer his calls. He will not respond to his texts. The only picture he has of him is one he sneaked of Daehyun napping in his bed, half of his face covered by a fluffy blanket, and sometimes Yongguk lies awake and wonders if it was all a fever dream. An extended mirage. He’d wanted so badly for Daehyun to be real, that he’d let himself pretend. But then Junhong will knock on his door with a mug of burnt bitter coffee, apologize for fucking up the grounds-to-water ratio, and ask him if he’s going to make it to the _dalkgalbi_ restaurant today. He will tell Yongguk he hasn’t seen Wonbin around, but that he’s keeping an eye out.

He will say, “Have you heard from him?”

And Yongguk will shake his head and think about deleting the picture from his phone, before he decides against that and sends Daehyun another desperate text instead.

“I hope he’s okay,” Junhong says this time, the sun streaming in behind him. He stands in front of Yongguk’s windows and his silhouette is dark, his entire body a shadow. It must be late in the day. “He doesn’t strike me as the type to just -- disappear.”

“Junhong,” Yongguk whispers, his voice sharp. The shadow startles at the sudden reprimanding tone.

“What?” Junhong responds, insolent. “You may not have noticed, but I was friends with him, too,” he says.

He puts the burnt coffee on Yongguk’s nightstand and stomps out of the room and Yongguk rolls over in bed, the scent of it filling his nostrils.

.

Daehyun gives him back his journals. He says he never wants to see them again. That night when they come together Yongguk can’t help but feel like he is breaking him, over and over, like the lashes of a whip on new skin, but Daehyun doesn’t let him stop, hooks his ankles behind Yongguk and pulls him in deeper, each time. Yongguk falls asleep sweaty and tangled, clinging to the other boy, their breaths filling each other up.

For the first time in a long while, Yongguk sleeps and does not dream.

In the morning, though he had a full night of sleep, he does not feel rested. Daehyun is sitting against the headboard, shadows under his eyes, watching the news on television. Yongguk is surprised he didn’t hear him wake. “How long have you been up?”

“Couldn’t sleep,” Daehyun says in a dull voice. His eyes are blank, tired. Yongguk wonders if he can see his own death in the corners.

“I’m sorry,” Yongguk says, again. He will never be able to say it enough.

“It’s--” Daehyun starts but doesn’t finish. What can he say? Yongguk watches the struggle behind his eyes and wants to drag him back down into bed, to hold him and cherish him and keep all the bad things out. He could do that -- be a shield for Daehyun. He could die for him, instead. Yongguk reaches for him, brushes his hand over Daehyun’s tentatively and freezes when Daehyun flinches away from his touch. “Sorry,” Daehyun says immediately, closing the distance between them, his hands shaking.

Yongguk wants so badly to kiss him.

On the bedside table, his phone rings. He ignores it. It ends, and then it rings again. Annoyed, he sits up in bed and answers, immediately met by Himchan’s electric voice.

At first, he thinks it is Himchan come to berate him for treating Daehyun so poorly, for making him leave, for keeping him to himself like some obsessed stalker, but then he catches Youngjae’s name too many times, and more words that make him sit up straighter against the headboard.

“What?” he interrupts Himchan’s ranting. “Say that again.”

“I said,” Himchan heaves, “Youngjae’s _gone_. They took him. They took my Youngjae. Mother fuckers! Who the fuck -- what do we do, Yongguk. What the fuck are we going to do?”

“Who took him?” Yongguk presses, keeping his voice steady. His blood pounds in his chest and ears. Daehyun has become more alert, pressing himself closer in order to hear the conversation.

“Who else,” Himchan scoffs, a manic laugh leaving his lips. “ _Chil Sung Pa_.”

Beside him, Daehyun stills like a deer in headlights. “No,” he whispers.

“What are we going to do?” Himchan asks again, the question ending in a choked sob.

“ _Don’t_ do anything, Himchan,” Yongguk orders immediately, feeling his shoulders straighten. “ _Wait._ Tell me what you know.”

Himchan shares a video with him. In it, Youngjae sits in a chair in the middle of a room, a ransom looped around his neck, head hanging as he struggles to stay conscious. He feels Daehyun tremble beside him, and the younger boy turns away when Yongguk watches the video a second time to see if there are any telling clues. “They said our little neighbor-alliance is dust, Yongguk,” Himchan snaps angrily. “They said we stole from them first -- we took one so they’re taking one. Fuck, Yongguk -- we can’t just--”

“I know,” Yongguk says, cutting Himchan off. “Let me think.”

He hangs up.

Daehyun’s movements are decisive as Yongguk stares, numb, at the screen of his phone. Out here by the beach in the height of summer he thought nothing would be able to reach them, but all it took was a phone call. Daehyun stands and wrenches the duffel out from under the bed to place on top of it, throws it open, and starts to pack their things from around the room, things they brought with them and things they collected -- shirts, and crumpled papers filled with Yongguk’s midnight ramblings, the hollow and delicate shells left to dry out on the nightstand. Dread freezes Yongguk’s insides, knots up his throat. He watches without comprehending, until he suddenly he does.

“Wait.” His command is soft and whispered. “What do you think you’re doing?”

Daehyun slows, but does not stop. The look he gives Yongguk is one of disbelief. “Packing,” he says. “Didn’t you hear them? Didn’t you hear Himchan-hyung?”

“We’re not going back,” Yongguk says, but Daehyun ignores him, continues to pack and dress. He returns from the bathroom with all of their toiletries, arms full of travel-sized bottles, and dumps the load into the duffel.

“We’re not going back,” Yongguk says, louder, more forceful.

“What do you mean?” Daehyun starts checking the drawers. They are mostly empty, and the duffel bag nearly full to its seams. The more he checks, the more frantic he becomes. “Youngjae’s been taken. We have to go back. We have to. _I have to._ This is my fault. Fuck, it’s all my fault. If I hadn’t left, Youngjae--”

The rest is drowned out by the buzzing in Yongguk’s ears. Daehyun’s movements are nothing but a flurry, too hard for him to follow. He needs him to stay still, to stay _here_ , to stay by his side. Safe. This is how it will happen, if he allows it. The spark igniting gunpowder. He knows it. “We’re staying.”

Disbelief falls from Daehyun’s face, only to replaced by shock and anger. Two blotches of pink form high on his cheeks. He opens and closes his mouth as though to speak, but nothing follows. His accusatory glare is enough. Yongguk feels like he’s being shot through with an arrow, but he will take Daehyun’s hate if the exchange is Daehyun’s life.

“Don’t be stupid,” Daehyun grits out choppily. He zips the duffel bag up so quickly Yongguk thinks the metal will fly apart, and he starts to move, dressing haphazardly and dogging Daehyun’s steps. “We’re going home. I did this. Youngjae needs us. Himchan needs us. _I have to fix this._ ”

Daehyun heaves the bag over his shoulder. It is nearly the size of him, Yongguk thinks. When he turns to face the door, Yongguk stands between him and it, hands out and palms up, panic quickly rising in his blood. “Where are you going?”

“To the car,” Daehyun says shortly. “Or the bus.”

He walks forward, but Yongguk blocks him. “No. Please don’t go out there. I can explain.”

“You’re our _leader_ ,” Daehyun says. “Youngjae’s our friend. They took him because of me. If you’re not going back, fine. But I’m going.”

His heart rate races at the thought of being separated. Something dark pulls at his chest. They can’t go. They have to stay here, where it’s safe, together. “You’d leave me so easily?”

Daehyun’s jaw hangs open like the gaping maw of a mounted fish. He splutters. “I can’t -- that’s not--” He tries to edge around Yongguk, but Yongguk catches both of Daehyun’s wrists in his grip, tightening his fingers when the younger twists at him. “Let go.”

“Don’t go,” Yongguk pleads, singular in his motivations.

“I can’t believe you right now,” Daehyun says, still twisting, the skin around his wrists red from it. His body is still pointing to the door. “Yongguk, let go, please.”

“Don’t go.” Desperation is a creature and it overtakes Yongguk, makes him behave like a lost man. He can’t be without Daehyun. He squeezes.

Daehyun’s face crumples in pain, and the shock of it makes Yongguk loosen his grip. Fast as a snake, Daehyun darts away, his hand on the doorknob, but desperation also makes Yongguk fast, too, and wild. In a moment Yongguk has the strap of the duffel in his grip. He wrenches it from Daehyun’s shoulder, throwing the bag to the floor, and Daehyun cries out in surprise when suddenly Yongguk has pinned him against the door by a forearm against the back of his neck, a leg wedged between his thighs.

Daehyun turns his face to the side, eyes squeezed shut and neck strained, where his pulse flutters under his skin, rapid and pronounced. He smells like the ocean. He has always smelled like the ocean, salt and a vastness incomprehensible.

He is scared.

Yongguk feels hot air rapidly leaving his lungs, and he lets go, shame curdling in his gut, an apology ready on his lips. He had not meant to hurt him, to scare him. He’d never done such a thing before. Suddenly he thinks of Yongnam. Yongnam would never have done this to someone he loved. “If you go,” he says, trying to explain his actions, “you’ll die.”

“You don’t know that,” Daehyun counters quickly in a small voice, looking away now. His pulse is still skittering there at the base of his throat. He turns and fingers wind into Yongguk’s shirt, though whether to bring Yongguk closer or to push him away remains uncertain.

“I do,” Yongguk says. “I know it. It’s the pattern. This is it.”

“Things can change,” Daehyun says. Yongguk shifts forward, but Daehyun’s fingers stop him. His eyes are wary, expression hurt but resigned. “Youngjae is family. _Our_ family. He chose us, like I chose us. How can you abandon him like this?”

For you, Yongguk wants to say. Anything for you. He would tear the world apart if he could for a chance to live out a real life with Daehyun. Maybe there have been lifetimes during which they do not meet. Lifetimes when Daehyun is allowed to grow old and grey, to have a wife, or a lover, to have children. Yongguk wonders, is he happier in those lifetimes when he doesn’t know Yongguk at all?

Worse, Yongguk thinks, have there been lifetimes when Daehyun has rejected him, or when Yongguk has driven him away? A cold, empty feeling arises within him at the thought.

Yongguk says nothing and steps back.

Daehyun eases out from under him and picks up the duffel discarded on the floor. He swipes Yongguk’s keys from the windowsill and walks gingerly back to the older man, cautious. “Will you drive?” he asks.

Yongguk does not stop him from opening the door this time. He pulls on the rest of his clothing as Daehyun walks out, and Yongguk follows. He’d follow him anywhere.

.


	7. Chapter 7

Yongguk is twenty three and it’s been 37 days since the last time he’s seen Daehyun. He worries and frets, annoying Junhong with his inability to sleep regular hours and eat regular meals, but mostly he dreams.

He dreams of the ocean, of stars trapped in its depth, of drowning and waking and dying by fire. He sees Daehyun’s face, twisted in pain, his marred back, the knowledge in his eyes. Daehyun is not just his sun but his little galaxy, his little pattern of constellations to guide him, and he is dimming. He wakes too hot and too cold, skin covered in gooseflesh, feeling as though he is being watched. _This is where I leave you,_ Daehyun says against his lips, a whisper and a promise.

He sees Daehyun in all of his customers at the restaurant. He sees Daehyun in Junhong. It is insufferable. His texts remain unanswered, unread. Junhong makes him burnt, bitter coffee, and sits up with him at night, because he is afraid to dream.

On day 40, he gets a call from an unknown number an hour before the sun rises, and he lets his phone ring and ring and ring until the sound echoes in his ears. Why won’t it go to voicemail? Annoyed, he answers, about to tell the caller to fuck off so he can go back to the weird fugue state between consciousness and sleep, but a hitched breath stops him.

“Hyung?”

He would know this voice in a vacuum, his face in the dark. If he is dreaming now, he does not want to wake up.

“Hyung, is it you?” Daehyun asks in a small, pitiful voice. “Please answer, Yongguk. Please -- I don’t know where else to go.”

“It’s me,” Yongguk says, holding the phone tight against his ear. “It’s me, of course it’s me. What’s wrong? Where are you? Why haven’t you answered any of my calls?” His blood is surging; he wants to move, to run to him.

Daehyun sniffs, and his voice is swollen and wet. “I’m sorry,” he says, and the way he says it -- dejected and absolute -- has Yongguk sitting up, worry creasing his brow.

“Don’t be. Hey, it’s okay, Daehyunnie. You’re calling me now. Where are you? Can I come get you?”

“I’m outside,” Daehyun whispers.

Sound leaves Yongguk’s senses suddenly, to be replaced by anticipation. His heart soars with it. “What are you doing out there? It’s so early. Or late--”

“I’m sorry,” Daehyun says again, miserable. “I just didn’t know where else to go, or what to do. I shouldn’t have come. I should have waited. It’s so early -- I’m sorry.”

“None of that,” Yongguk says, solid and loving. “I’m coming down now.” He leaves the comfort of his bed and dresses quickly, pulling on whatever is within hand’s reach -- athletic shorts and a ratty t-shirt -- and grabs his keys from his nightstand. His mind races with scenarios that might lead Daehyun to be waiting for him outside on his stoop. “Don’t go anywhere. I’ll be down in two seconds, Daehyunnie.” He trips into his slippers, and the door bangs shut as he leaves.

He doesn’t hang up, feeling as though Daehyun is a phantom who will disappear when the line goes dead, and his own breaths echo back into his ears as he takes the stairs down two at a time, nearly tumbling out of the window on the second floor landing. He rushes out of the door, only slowing when he sees no one waiting for him on the steps leading down to the street.

Is this all a dream, after all? He pauses and looks at the screen of his phone, where the unfamiliar number is still trailing; the call hasn’t ended yet. _Hyung?_ he hears from the speakers, tinny and far-away.

“Hyung?”

The voice comes from below and behind him, somewhere to the right, and Yongguk takes those last few steps down to the pavement, turns, and finds a boy sitting on the curb, the hood of his sweater hooked over his head, a duffle bag over his sharp knees. Their eyes meet before the boy tucks his chin against his chest, but Yongguk still catches the spectacular bruising on his face, the ugly purples and blues on his skin.

Yongguk hangs up and pockets his phone, and Daehyun doesn’t disappear. His figure, small and hunched, shrinks further as he approaches. Like a hunter coaxing an animal from its hiding spot, Yongguk crouches low in front of him. Slowly, he reaches forward and lifts Daehyun’s chin with his finger, eyes stinging when Daehyun refuses to meet his gaze.

“What happened?” he asks, feeling his breath leave him. The bruising is heaviest around Daehyun’s left eye, and the corner of his mouth is puffy and tender-looking around a split in his lip. He turns Daehyun’s face, checking for more bruising, relieved when that seems to be most of it. Yongguk helps him stand, taking Daehyun’s bag from him and hoisting it over his own shoulder, catching Daehyun around his slim waist when he nearly doubles over, wincing over some pain that Yongguk cannot see.

“I left,” Daehyun says, holding a hand over his stomach. “I left.”

Yongguk brings him upstairs. He ushers him into his room, quietly telling a confused and concerned Junhong to go back to bed when Daehyun seems to cower in his sudden presence, and he closes the door and checks Daehyun over. The duffle bag goes into a corner, and Daehyun slips out of his hoodie with little resistance, sitting blankly on Yongguk’s bed. Yongguk kneels in front of him, between his knees, hands roaming lightly over his skin, tracing him to make sure he’s real, pausing over bruises that make Daehyun hiss and flinch, the worst of them spanning one side of his rib-cage. Daehyun sits and lets him, and by the time Yongguk’s hands travel back up to the other boy’s face, his cheeks are wet with tears.

“I’ll kill them,” Yongguk says, bringing their foreheads close together, holding Daehyun by his neck, breathing him in. Daehyun’s thighs part for him, to bring him tight against his body, and when he sighs he shudders.

“It’s how things go,” Daehyun says. “What’s done is done. He told me never to come back.”

“I’ll kill them,” Yongguk promises again, pressing their lips together.

“I don’t understand,” Daehyun cries, his breathing ragged as Yongguk kisses him, tears and all. “He didn’t even fight for me. He just let them -- like I was nothing. I’m nothing.”

“ _Shh._ ” Yongguk presses up against Daehyun, lowering him onto his back on the bed, slotting their bodies together. He hovers over him, caging him in with his elbows and knees. “I can’t believe you’re really here right now.”

“I chose you,” Daehyun says, “over everything. Am I crazy? Is this love? Was it a choice, after all?”

Yongguk does not know. He only knows that Daehyun is here; he has returned to him, broken but whole. His Daehyun. His little galaxy. He kisses him, and kisses him, and kisses him.

.


	8. Chapter 8

Yongguk keeps the ocean to their right for as long as he can as they make the drive back to Seoul, like the longer they can see it the longer it has a hold over them. It disappears around a bend, and the ocean becomes a sea of fields, the grass overgrown and brown at the edges, thirsty for rain. Daehyun sits in the passenger side and dozes under Yongguk’s hoodie, carefully silent, still hurting from being thrown against the door, and Yongguk is reminded of when he came back to him from his brother, hunted and uncertain, wanting comfort but refusing it when it was freely given.

“I’m sorry,” Yongguk says again, and again, and again, over the crackling music on the radio. “I didn’t mean it.”

“I know,” Daehyun mumbles. He pulls the hoodie tighter around his body like a cocoon. “I know you didn’t.”

“I’m just scared,” Yongguk admits freely. “If we go back -- when we go back. What if. What if--” He loses the ability to form words. Already Yongguk is taciturn by nature, but now he feels reduced to nothing under the weight of what he knows, what he’s afraid of. He stares at the road, gripping the steering wheel hard. “What if.”

“Yongguk,” Daehyun interrupts him, his voice suddenly stern and low. “You didn’t mean it. It was an accident. Get over it.”

“I don’t want to lose you.”

“I don’t want to lose you, either.” He reaches over and curves his fingers over one of Yongguk’s hands on the wheel, coaxing him to loosen his grip. Daehyun’s hand fits in Yongguk’s like it always has, palms slotting together, the perfect size, when he holds it over the middle divide in their seats. “Going back doesn’t mean I love you any less.”

“That’s not what I’m afraid of,” Yongguk says through gritted teeth.

Daehyun shrugs. He rubs his thumb back and forth over the back of Yongguk’s hand, where the skin is smooth and soft. “Thought I’d say it. Just in case.”

.

A month and a half apart and the first thing Himchan does upon seeing Yongguk is charge him against the wall, the dishes in the kitchen sink rattling with the force of it, as Junhong stands to the side biting his lips and Jongup clenches his fists, expression grim. Daehyun pulls at Himchan’s shoulder, but Himchan is a stone wall, and Yongguk can see the grief in his eyes.

“If you hadn’t left--” Himchan growls. “You absolute fuck. You absolute--”

“I’m sorry,” Yongguk says, holding up his hands. It seems to be all he can say these days.

“Sorry doesn’t get him back.”

“I know,” Yongguk says gently, “but it’s all I got, right now.”

Himchan lets Daehyun ease him off of Yongguk, lets Daehyun pull him to the couch, where he drops into a seat, fingers pressed against his temples. “This is so fucked up,” Himchan mutters. Daehyun sits next to him, an arm draped over his shoulders. The scene is suddenly familiar to Yongguk, only it had been Youngjae in Daehyun’s spot in his memory.

“Have there been any updates?” Yongguk asks the group, taking in the shadows under their eyes and the suffocating somber cloud hanging over them all. He and Daehyun came over after dropping off their things at Yongguk’s apartment, where the air had felt dead and static. Junhong goes to Daehyun and sits next to him on the couch, the three of them squeezed onto the seats. He says something that only Daehyun can hear, welcoming him back. Daehyun responds by putting his other hand over Junhong’s thigh, and Yongguk swallows back the regret building at the base of his throat as he nears them, hovering by the counter separating the kitchen from the living room. He’d never thought about it or acknowledged it before, but Daehyun had folded himself so seamlessly into the group, like he had always belonged.

Yongguk stands like an outsider, unsure of his place.

“No,” Jongup answers. “They haven’t contacted us since Himchan called you. They want the ransom by the end of the month, or they kill him. No police or other gangs, or they kill him. If they suspect, they kill him. Simple enough.”

Himchan lets out a choked noise, and Daehyun is there again, his arm over his shoulders, offering what comfort he can.

“It’s my fault,” Daehyun says. “If I go back, maybe--”

“You’re not going back there,” Junhong snarls before Yongguk has the chance to say it himself. “You stay with us.” A charge of ferocity sparks through the group, raising the little hairs on their arms, pumping blood quickly through their chests. “We’ll get Youngjae-hyung back. We will.”

“We don’t have the funds for ransom,” Himchan says.

“But there’s a bank in Sinchon we can hit,” Jongup finishes. “I’ve done it before, before I met you guys. Their security is shit.”

“Won’t it have...gotten better?” Daehyun asks.

Jongup shakes his head. “I took a peek yesterday, asked around. They changed management and things are falling through the cracks. They never got around to upgrading security even though they got the funding for it.”

“How soon can you figure out schedules?” Yongguk asks.

Jongup’s eyes snap to attention. “By the end of the week,” he says. “We could be ready as early as Monday.”

“Himchan and I will check the vaults,” Yongguk says, falling back on old habits. “We’ll figure out what we need to do and how to get in. You and Junhong will figure out how we get out.”

A murmur of acknowledgment. A beat passes, and Daehyun looks up from his seat between Himchan and Junhong. “What about me?”

Yongguk says, “You sit this one out.”

Daehyun’s eyes smolder like coals, and Yongguk has to look away, has to believe in what he is saying. They returned as promised, but he will still do whatever he can to protect him.

“I want to help,” Daehyun says, defiance festering in his body.

Yongguk crosses his arms. “We don’t need it. Not this time. You’ve never worked with us like this before, and I don’t want the first time to be such an important hit, where one mistake means Youngjae’s life.”

Daehyun presses his lips together, his mouth a hard straight line, and Junhong looks between the two of them, back and forth, confusion making his face soft. Himchan says, “He’s right,” and that settles it.

That night, Daehyun will not let Yongguk touch him in bed, punishing him. His curved back to Yongguk, he says, “They’re my friends, too.”

“You’re too precious to me,” Yongguk says, hovering as close as he can, breathing the words over Daehyun’s skin. “I don’t want to lose you.”

“You can’t do this to me,” Daehyun whispers. “It’s like dying.”

Yongguk flinches like he’s been hit. “I just want to protect you.”

Daehyun says nothing. Moments later, he’s asleep.

.


	9. Chapter 9

The bank job goes so smoothly Yongguk might have thought he dreamed it if not for the heavy stacks of paper money in his duffel bag. They’ve split, hiding out in DVD- or PC-rooms or other safehouses for a couple of hours so that their trail can cool, and when the sun has set Yongguk winds his way back to his apartment, knowing the others are also on their ways home.

His rooms are dark when he returns, the air still and quiet. He hears traffic passing by outside their thin walls, and treads carefully. “Daehyun?”

A lump on his couch moves, sitting up, and slowly the form of Daehyun solidifies.

“What are you doing, sitting in the dark like that?” Yongguk asks, turning the light on.

The brightness engulfs the living room quickly, filling corners, illuminating Daehyun’s pale and drawn face, his soft clothes. The boy on his couch pulls the throw around his shoulders closer to his body, his hair a mess, and blinks owlishly into the light. “You’re back,” Daehyun whispers, a strain in his voice.

“Yes.”

“The others, are they--”

“Yes,” Yongguk says, sitting down on the couch next to him. Daehyun bobs with the springs as Yongguk shifts closer, putting the duffel full of cash against an arm of the couch. “Everyone’s safe.”

“That’s good,” Daehyun says. “I was worried.”

Yongguk sits back. He moves to put an arm around Daehyun’s shoulders, concerned with his tacit behavior, hurt lancing through his chest when Daehyun avoids his arm with a tiny movement. He ends up throwing his arm over the back of the couch, the high from completing a successful heist quickly seeping away. “Everything okay?”

Daehyun shrugs, avoiding looking at Yongguk. His eyes are dark and full of something Yongguk does not recognize.

“You’re not gonna ask me how it went?” Yongguk probes playfully, hoping for any sort of response.

Daehyun sighs and draws his knees up to his chest, sitting with his arms wrapped around him under the throw blanket. He turns his cheek. “Everyone’s safe. I guess that’s what matters.”

“Everyone’s safe,” Yongguk confirms. “And you, too.”

“Yeah.”

The silence is dark and heavy, a stormcloud brewing over them. Yongguk feels like a rock in his seat, blood stilling, and wishes desperately for lightning. “What’s wrong?”

Daehyun shrugs again, his apathy unnerving. It reminds him of when they first met, Junho and _Chil Sung Pa_ fanned around him and Daehyun’s eyes like two coals, the room steeped in tightly wound anger.

“Everyone is safe,” Yongguk repeats, hoping the accomplishment will break through their barrier. The job went so well. They have the money they need to ransom Youngjae. They’re going to get Youngjae back. First, he brought Daehyun back when he wanted to return; now, he’s got the money they so desperately need. Things are going as planned. Daehyun’s blankness suddenly frustrates him. He remembers Yongnam and how things used to be, the world’s attention on his twin and Yongguk shoved to the side. And Daehyun doesn’t look at him. “Seriously,” he asks, raising his voice a little, “please tell me what’s wrong. What happened this time? I want to know--”

“I was thinking,” Daehyun starts, his voice breaking through Yongguk’s like the crashing of waves, still looking off into the corner at something only he can see. “Is this how it’s going to be? Out of one cage and into another. Cage to cage to cage. I wanted to come back because I wanted to be with my friends, _our_ friends. But when you all left, when the texts stopped coming, I thought, what if you never came back? Would I be stuck here? Or worse, what if you came back and I still was?”

All of Yongguk’s attention narrows to a fine point, to the way Daehyun is clutching the throw blanket around him. The way he is speaking scares him. He reaches out and wraps an arm around Daehyun’s waist, pulling him in close, a protective motion, but Daehyun doesn’t sink against his side like he normally does. “What are you talking about?” he asks quietly.

“Did I make the right choice, choosing you?” Daehyun asks him. His shoulders straighten, and light dances behind his eyes. “Did I? Do I make the same choice, every time? An idiot who chooses death--”

“Daehyun, no--”

“I didn’t trade my brother for you!” Daehyun suddenly shouts, and they both still, caught up short on breath, and Yongguk realizes Daehyun is finally looking -- no, staring -- at him, afraid, resigned, hopeful. His pulse jumps in his neck, fluttering and vulnerable. Yongguk cups Daehyun’s face in his hands, bringing their foreheads close together.

“You didn’t--”

“I didn’t trade him for you, Yongguk,” Daehyun says again, quieter this time, a tremor in his voice. He closes his eyes and Yongguk watches the words form in his mind before they make it out of his lips. “Wonbin said he loved me. He said he was going to protect me. He didn’t, though. He locked me away, or sold me to the highest bidder. He policed everything I did, and I thought I owed him, so I let him -- I let him, I let him--” Daehyun breaks off with a choked sound, and Yongguk shushes him, draws him close, kisses his nose and his forehead and loosens his hold when Daehyun pulls away. “You’re the same.”

The bottom of his heart drops away in his chest. “I’m not,” is all Yongguk can manage at once.

“It starts like this, keeping me away, keeping me to yourself; it gets worse--”

“I would never do that to you, Daehyun,” Yongguk says, and Daehyun falls silent. But in that silence Yongguk remembers how he felt, driving the long hours to their beach vacation, the hiding and the lying, and an uncomfortable feeling begins to creep into his limbs: guilt. “I was scared,” Yongguk says. “I’m sorry. I did those things because I was terrified of losing you, Daehyun. Don’t you get that?”

“I need you not to be scared, then.”

“What?”

The muscles twitch in his jaw when Daehyun clenches his teeth. He says, “I love you, I do, but your fear will ruin us. I’m not afraid of death, Yongguk.” He brushes his fingers over Yongguk’s ear, down the column of his throat, resting his palm over Yongguk’s heartbeat. “The first week at the beach was the greatest, like everything was golden. I want that back. Don’t you?”

“Yes, but now that I know you,” Yongguk admits, “I don’t know what I’d do without you.” His face is wet. This feels like standing at the edge of a cliff, like finality. Daehyun tilts his chin up and kisses him, like sealing a promise. “I don’t know how not to be afraid.”

“We’ll have another story,” Daehyun says.

“It’ll never be enough.” Yongguk returns the kiss, as Daehyun shifts out from under the blanket and into his lap.

“I know. For me, too.”

They come together slow and ragged, jagged pieces sliding home. Daehyun’s sweat pools in the dip of his collarbones and Yongguk’s fingers dig bruises into his sides. They kiss for as long as they can. When the sun comes up, they are still intertwined, Yongguk’s head resting on Daehyun’s chest, listening for his heart.

.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry /o\


	10. Chapter 10

Daehyun is twenty one and this bullet fired from his brother’s gun will kill him. Sometimes he is younger when he dies, and sometimes he is older, but this time he is twenty one.

Yongguk had argued with Daehyun about going with them, but relented in the end. He didn't want Daehyun to feel like he was locked in a cage. He didn't want Daehyun to ever feel that way again. They kissed in Yongguk's bed for a long time after that. And then, the thing is, it had been going well. They brought the money, and _Chil Sung Pa_ brought Youngjae, but when the police showed up the whole operation had fallen to pieces. Daehyun isn’t sure who fired the first weapon. Had it been the police? Had it been his brother? Had it been Yongguk? He supposes it doesn’t matter now. Youngjae is dead, was cut down between them when _Chil Sung Pa_ realized what was happening. When Junho ran, Himchan had given chase, his grief turned quickly to anger and rage, and then they were all running -- from the cops, from each other, towards each other again.

He hopes the others made it out, or at least are now in police custody. Serving some time was better than being dead. He coughs, feeling fire spread through his chest at the involuntary action as blood bubbles to his throat and coats his teeth. Yongguk hovers above him, his visage bright in the murky darkness. Yongguk. His Yongguk.

“No,” Yongguk is saying, over and over again. A chant. A song. “No, no, no, no.”

Daehyun had come across Yongguk facing Wonbin, the two of them frozen when they should have been running. Yongguk had his teeth bared like a tiger. Probably he was remembering the beating Wonbin had solicited for his younger brother when Daehyun left the gang.

Wonbin, tall and proud. Brother-killer. It was all going to be shit for him, when the police caught up to him, he must have realized. Too many mistakes under his belt: drug trafficking, accomplices to murder, other things he'd done that he had never wanted Daehyun to know. He wanted to die, Daehyun could see in his eyes, because otherwise he'd be spending the rest of his life fading behind bars. So he wanted to be remembered, too.

The first bullet had grazed Daehyun's side, but the second buried itself deep in his belly. The shock that his brother had fired his weapon had not let him register the pain, at first. Yongguk plugged Wonbin with a bullet to his forehead as the brothers regarded each other, both of them reduced to something much simpler in just a moment. Family. Daehyun suddenly remembered his parents. He hadn’t thought of them for a while, not since they kicked him out of the house. The lie he'd told Yongguk and run with about money and misunderstandings. He’d shown up on Wonbin’s doorstep with nothing but a duffle bag, and his brother had taken him in. He wasn’t all bad.

He hit the ground and heard Wonbin crumple as well, but Wonbin didn’t have a Yongguk.

“He’s dead,” Daehyun cries, his hand covering his own wound. Yongguk moves him and Daehyun screams; it’s excruciating, like being thrown into a pit of jagged spikes. He feels Yongguk apply pressure to the wound but it’s a slippery thing, and there’s too much blood. Yongguk curses. “You killed him,” Daehyun whispers, tasting the blood on his teeth.

“This wasn’t supposed to happen,” Yongguk says. His voice is a gash of sound, too deep with grief. Daehyun can feel it in his bones. “You were supposed to stay _safe_.”

“Yongguk,” Daehyun chokes out. His heart is beating too quickly, so quickly he thinks it might burst. “It hurts.”

“ _Shh_.” Yongguk moves him again. His body is a rag doll, but still he screams. He wishes Yongguk wouldn’t move him, but he wishes also to be held, to curl up with Yongguk in their bed. He wants Yongguk to bring him home and hide him under the covers, warm, Yongguk’s body pressed against his. They could start over. He'd tell Yongguk all his truths. He'd let him in. They could do it, be good together, without the messiness of their lives tainting it, couldn't they? The pain is so immense now that he seems to float above it. “I’ll get help,” Yongguk whispers urgently. “You’re going to be okay. The police -- they’ll get you to the hospital--”

“ _Don’t leave me._ ” Panic suddenly gives Daehyun the strength to clutch at Yongguk’s shoulders. “Not _n-now._ ”

“You were supposed to stay safe,” Yongguk says again. His face is bright, pale as the moon. Tears glisten on his cheeks. Daehyun has always wondered at Yongguk’s silent beauty, his quiet strength. “ _Daehyun._ ”

Blood pools around them. The police and the hospital would not be able to do anything, Daehyun realizes distantly. The bullet tore a hole through him, and he is fading fast. Perhaps if he’d been standing farther away, if there hadn’t been an exit wound... With a trembling and bloodied hand, he cups Yongguk’s cheek. Yongguk holds his hand there, leaning into it, kisses his bloody palm. His lips come away red.

“I love you,” Daehyun says. “We didn’t have enough time. Hardly any time at all. I love you.”

“Don’t,” Yongguk pleads with him, his shoulders shaking with sobs. His mouth gapes open wide as he lets out an animalistic cry.

“Say it,” Daehyun breathes. Every word is effort, energy that he doesn’t have. “Say it back.”

“I love you,” Yongguk says, again and again. “I love you, I love you.”

“Find me. Next time. Find me faster.”

“ _I will_ ,” Yongguk promises. “Oh, god. _Daehyun._ ”

“Next time,” Daehyun tries to say. There is no air left in his lungs. A ragged breath leaves him empty. “We’ll be better.”

“Better, yes.” He thinks Yongguk is rocking him, back and forth. He looks at Yongguk’s face one last time before his eyelids become too heavy and they close. The sensation is like falling asleep in a boat being rocked by the ocean’s waves. He thinks of home. Yongguk, his ocean. “We’ll be perfect,” Yongguk says.

.

Daehyun is almost twenty one and Yongguk wants him to live to be twenty two. They’ve packed a duffel bag for what Yongguk promises will be a short trip to the beach, where they can remain unbothered from the outside world for as long as they want. Daehyun sits in the passenger seat, contemplating what he has learned about himself, about Yongguk, about the two of them together. How many lifetimes has it been, and how many lifetimes will there be? What if this is the last?

The ride is smooth, and the heat of the sun sticky. They roll the windows down and Daehyun sticks his hand out the side, playing with the wind, letting it force his palm up and down.

“Didn’t your parents ever tell you you’ll lose a hand that way?” Yongguk asks, smirking at Daehyun.

“Probably once, when I was really little.” It’s enough for Daehyun to bring his hand back inside. Restless now, he eyes Yongguk’s hand near the gearshift, his fingers curled up appealingly like a flower’s petals. He reaches over to thread his fingers through Yongguk’s fingers, feeling their palms slide together.

Yongguk says, “I wish I could keep driving with you. Forever. Just the two of us in this car.”

Daehyun says, “Eventually, you’ll drive us into the ocean. What then?”

Yongguk says nothing for a moment, but he smiles. He takes Daehyun’s hand and kisses his knuckles while keeping his eyes on the road. “We’ll just have to keep going, I guess.”

.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> blergh ach i needed this to be done. i'm sorry. thanks for your patience. hope it was somewhat enjoyable or at least angsty.

**Author's Note:**

> Originally this was going to be for [sixwarriors](https://twitter.com/sixwarriors), a novella-writing challenge focused on B.A.P. I really want to thank them for organizing such a challenge!


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